I am trying to get up to speed with Irony. I keep seeing some terminology that I don't yet understand: terminals, non-terminals, token, state machine, Associativity, Abstract Syntax Tree.
Can someone please give some meaning to some of these terms? I keep reading great things about Irony, so any help you can give with learning how to use it would be great.
Edits in bold
These terms are not specific to Irony, but are concepts from computer science.
A token is an atomic element of parsing, one which cannot be broken down further when tokenizing. Tokenizing is a subset of lexical analysis. It sounds like you're generally unfamiliar with the theory behind parsing - lots more over at Wikipedia. Good stuff here as well.
Terminals and non-terminals refer to types of tokens. See my 2nd link for details on those.
Edit: an abstract syntax tree is yet another concept in parsing. Since these are all concepts which are not specific to Irony, you can find a lot just by Googling or looking on Wikipedia. Cheers!