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Top-down parsing in computer science is a parsing strategy where one first looks at the highest level of the parse tree and works down the parse tree by using the rewriting rules of a formal grammar. [1] LL parsers are a type of parser that uses a top-down parsing strategy.
Another method [8] is to build the parse forest as you go, augmenting each Earley item with a pointer to a shared packed parse forest (SPPF) node labelled with a triple (s, i, j) where s is a symbol or an LR(0) item (production rule with dot), and i and j give the section of the input string derived by this node. A node's contents are either a ...
The parsing table instructs it to apply rule (1) from the grammar and write the rule number 1 to the output stream. The stack becomes: [ F, +, F, ), $] The parser now has an 'a' on its input stream and an 'F' as its stack top. The parsing table instructs it to apply rule (3) from the grammar and write the rule number 3 to the output stream.
In computer science, a recursive descent parser is a kind of top-down parser built from a set of mutually recursive procedures (or a non-recursive equivalent) where each such procedure implements one of the nonterminals of the grammar. Thus the structure of the resulting program closely mirrors that of the grammar it recognizes. [1] [2]
Birman's work was later refined by Aho and Ullman; and renamed as Top-Down Parsing Language (TDPL), and Generalized TDPL (GTDPL), respectively. These algorithms were the first of their kind to employ deterministic top-down parsing with backtracking. [2] [3] Bryan Ford developed PEGs as an expansion of GTDPL and TS.
In computer science, an operator-precedence parser is a bottom-up parser that interprets an operator-precedence grammar.For example, most calculators use operator-precedence parsers to convert from the human-readable infix notation relying on order of operations to a format that is optimized for evaluation such as Reverse Polish notation (RPN).
When a top-down parser tries to parse an ambiguous input with respect to an ambiguous context-free grammar (CFG), it may need an exponential number of steps (with respect to the length of the input) to try all alternatives of the CFG in order to produce all possible parse trees. This eventually would require exponential memory space.
(For example, upon encountering a variable declaration, user-written code could save the name and type of the variable into an external data structure, so that these could be checked against later variable references detected by the parser.)