The following is an extract from http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/yaccpaper.htm 

Yacc provides a general tool for imposing structure on the input to a computer program. The Yacc user prepares a specification of the input process; this includes rules describing the input structure, code to be invoked when these rules are recognized, and a low-level routine to do the basic input. Yacc then generates a function to control the input process. This function, called a parser, calls the user-supplied low-level input routine (the lexical analyzer) to pick up the basic items (called tokens) from the input stream. These tokens are organized according to the input structure rules, called grammar rules; when one of these rules has been recognized, then user code supplied for this rule, an action, is invoked; actions have the ability to return values and make use of the values of other actions.