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Applying the rules recursively to a source string of symbols will usually terminate in a final output string consisting only of terminal symbols. Consider a grammar defined by two rules. In this grammar, the symbol Б is a terminal symbol and Ψ is both a non-terminal symbol and the start symbol. The production rules for creating strings are as ...
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 ...
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
Equivalence here means that any of the three structures shown in the left column may be replaced, in any occurrence outside of strings, by the symbol shown in the same line in the right column without any effect on the action of the program. Naur changed two of Backus's symbols to commonly available characters. The ::= symbol was originally a :≡.
This production rule defines the nonterminal digit which is on the left side of the assignment. The vertical bar represents an alternative and the terminal symbols are enclosed with quotation marks followed by a semicolon as terminating character.
Parse tree of Python code with inset tokenization. The syntax of textual programming languages is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for lexical structure) and Backus–Naur form (a metalanguage for grammatical structure) to inductively specify syntactic categories (nonterminal) and terminal symbols. [7]
It also distinguishes a special nonterminal symbol, called the start symbol. The language generated by the grammar is defined to be the set of all strings without any nonterminal symbols that can be generated from the string consisting of a single start symbol by (possibly repeated) application of its rules in whatever way possible.
S is called the start symbol. In a left-regular grammar, (also called left-linear grammar), all rules obey the forms A → a; A → Ba; A → ε; The language described by a given grammar is the set of all strings that contain only terminal symbols and can be derived from the start symbol by repeated application of production rules.