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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]
In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is in Greibach normal form (GNF) if the right-hand sides of all production rules start with a terminal symbol, optionally followed by some variables. 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.
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]
All linear languages are context-free; conversely, an example of a context-free, non-linear language is the Dyck language of well-balanced bracket pairs. Hence, the regular languages are a proper subset of the linear languages, which in turn are a proper subset of the context-free languages.
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 ...
In computer science, the Earley parser is an algorithm for parsing strings that belong to a given context-free language, though (depending on the variant) it may suffer problems with certain nullable grammars. [1]