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The set of all context-free languages is identical to the set of languages accepted by pushdown automata, which makes these languages amenable to parsing.Further, for a given CFG, there is a direct way to produce a pushdown automaton for the grammar (and thereby the corresponding language), though going the other way (producing a grammar given an automaton) is not as direct.
The representation of a grammar is a set of syntax diagrams. Each diagram defines a "nonterminal" stage in a process. There is a main diagram which defines the language in the following way: to belong to the language, a word must describe a path in the main diagram. Each diagram has an entry point and an end point.
The language is context-free; however, it can be proved that it is not regular. If the productions S → a, S → b, are added, a context-free grammar for the set of all palindromes over the alphabet { a, b} is obtained. [8]
To convert a grammar to Chomsky normal form, a sequence of simple transformations is applied in a certain order; this is described in most textbooks on automata theory. [4]: 87–94 [5] [6] [7] The presentation here follows Hopcroft, Ullman (1979), but is adapted to use the transformation names from Lange, Leiß (2009).
A non-strict form allows one exception to this format restriction for allowing the empty word (epsilon, ε) to be a member of the described language. The normal form was established by Sheila Greibach and it bears her name. More precisely, a context-free grammar is in Greibach normal form, if all production rules are of the form:
The grammar doesn't cover all language rules, such as the size of numbers, or the consistent use of names and their definitions in the context of the whole program. LR parsers use a context-free grammar that deals just with local patterns of symbols. The example grammar used here is a tiny subset of the Java or C language: r0: Goal → Sums eof
Deterministic context-free languages can be recognized by a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time and O(log 2 n) space; as a corollary, DCFL is a subset of the complexity class SC. [3] The set of deterministic context-free languages is closed under the following operations: [4] complement; inverse homomorphism; right quotient with a ...
Deterministic context-free grammars were particularly useful because they could be parsed sequentially by a deterministic pushdown automaton, which was a requirement due to computer memory constraints. [4] In 1965, Donald Knuth invented the LR(k) parser and proved that there exists an LR(k) grammar for every deterministic context-free language. [5]