It's been ratling in my brain for a while.
I've had some investigation on Compilers/Flex/Byson and stuff but I never found a good reference that talked in detail about the "parsing stack", or how to go about implementing one.
Does anyone know of good references where I could catch up?
Edit: I do appreciate all the compiler references, and I'm going to get some of the books listed, but my main focus was on the Parsing itself and not what you do with it after.
The Dragon book! I used it quite recently to write a compiler (in PHP!) for a processing language for template files written in RTF...
Check out "Brinch Hansen on Pascal Compilers".. it was written in 1985, but I used it last year for a course on compilers (by Per Brinch Hansen ofcourse.) and found it very concise and helpful for compiler design.
A parser is basically a finite state machine, aka a finite automaton. You should find a book on theory of computation, which discusses finite automata, and things like regular languages, context free languages, etc.
or Crenshaw's great tutorial: http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/compiler.pdf