This second edition of Grune and Jacobs brilliant work presents new developments and discoveries that have been made in the field. Parsing, also referred to as syntax analysis, has been and continues to be an essential part of computer science and linguistics. Parsing techniques have grown considerably in importance, both in computer science, ie. advanced compilers often use general CF parsers, and computational linguistics where such parsers are the only option. They are used in a variety of software products including Web browsers, interpreters in computer devices, and data compression programs; and they are used extensively in linguistics.

Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide

Left corner parsing refers to a class of parsing procedures in which the productions are recognized in a particular order which is different than both bottom up and top down. Each production is recognized after its left descendant but before its other descendants. Procedures in this class have occurred frequently in the compiler literature. In this paper a class of grammars, called LC (k) grammars, is defined and shown to be exactly those grammars for which a certain canonical pushdown machine that does left corner parsing is deterministic. A subset of LC(k) grammars, called strong LC(k) grammars, is defined and shown to be those grammars that can be deterministically left corner parsed by a simplified canonical machine. It is shown that when a particular grammatical rewriting procedure is applied to a grammar, the resulting grammar is (strong) LL(k) if and only if the original grammar is (strong) LC(k). This implies that the class of LC(k) languages is identical to the class of LL(k) languages. The syntax directed translations on LC(k) grammars that can be performed by the canonical pushdown machine are also discussed.

Deterministic left corner parsing

Methods of describing the syntax of programming languages in ways that are more flexible and natural than conventional BNF descriptions are considered. These methods involve the use of ambiguous context-free grammars together with rules to resolve syntactic ambiguities. It is shown how efficient LR and LL parsers can be constructed directly from certain classes of these specifications.

Deterministic parsing of ambiguous grammars

This monograph develops a theory of grammatical covers, normal forms and parsing. Covers, formally defined in 1969, describe a relation between the sets of parses of two context-free grammars. If this relation exists then in a formal model of parsing it is possible to have, except for the output, for both grammars the same parser. Questions concerning the possibility to cover a certain grammar with grammars that conform to some requirements on the productions or the derivations will be raised and answered. Answers to these cover problems will be obtained by introducing algorithms that describe a transformation of an input grammar into an output grammar which satisfies the requirements. The main emphasis in this monograph is on transformations of context-free grammars to context-free grammars in some normal form. However, not only transformations of this kind will be discussed, but also transformations which yield grammars which have useful parsing properties.

Context-Free Grammars: Covers, Normal Forms, and Parsing

We consider methods of describing the syntax of programming languages in ways that are more flexible and natural than conventional BNF descriptions. These methods involve the use of ambiguous context-free grammars together with rules to resolve syntactic ambiguities. We show how efficient LL and LR parsers can be constructed directly from certain classes of these specifications.

Derick Wood

Papers

The theory of left factored languages: part 2

The theory of left factored languages: Part 1

A generalised normal form theorem for context-free grammars

The normal form theorem—another proof