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Terminal symbols are the elementary symbols of the language defined as part of a formal grammar. Nonterminal symbols (or syntactic variables) are replaced by groups of terminal symbols according to the production rules. The terminals and nonterminals of a particular grammar are in two completely separate sets.
Nonterminal symbols are blue and terminal symbols are red. In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules can be applied to a nonterminal symbol regardless of its context. In particular, in a context-free grammar, each production rule is of the form
Metalanguages have their own metasyntax each composed of terminal symbols, nonterminal symbols, and metasymbols. A terminal symbol, such as a word or a token, is a stand-alone structure in a language being defined. A nonterminal symbol represents a syntactic category, which defines one or more valid phrasal or sentence structure consisted of an ...
Unlike a semi-Thue system, which is wholly defined by these rules, a grammar further distinguishes between two kinds of symbols: nonterminal and terminal symbols; each left-hand side must contain at least one nonterminal symbol. It also distinguishes a special nonterminal symbol, called the start symbol.
where A, B, and C are nonterminal symbols, the letter a is a terminal symbol (a symbol that represents a constant value), S is the start symbol, and ε denotes the empty string. Also, neither B nor C may be the start symbol, and the third production rule can only appear if ε is in L(G), the language produced by the context-free grammar G.
T is a set ("alphabet") of terminal symbols, F is a set of so-called index symbols, or indices, S ∈ N is the start symbol, and; P is a finite set of productions. In productions as well as in derivations of indexed grammars, a string ("stack") σ ∈ F * of index symbols is attached to every nonterminal symbol A ∈ N, denoted by A[σ].
An unrestricted grammar is a formal grammar = (,,,), where . is a finite set of nonterminal symbols,; is a finite set of terminal symbols with and disjoint, [note 1]; is a finite set of production rules of the form , where and are strings of symbols in and is not the empty string, and
A context-sensitive grammar is a noncontracting grammar in which all rules are of the form αAβ → αγβ, where A is a nonterminal, and γ is a nonempty string of nonterminal and/or terminal symbols. However, some authors use the term context-sensitive grammar to refer to noncontracting grammars in general. [1]