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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 ...
A derivation rule is composed by a nonterminal symbol and an expression . A special expression α s {\displaystyle \alpha _{s}} is the starting point of the grammar. [ 2 ] In case no α s {\displaystyle \alpha _{s}} is specified, the first expression of the first rule is used.
A nonterminal function is a function (node) which is either a root or a branch in that tree whereas a terminal function is a function (node) in a parse tree which is a leaf. For binary trees (where each parent node has two immediate child nodes), the number of possible parse trees for a sentence with n words is given by the Catalan number C n ...
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 ...
An EBNF consists of terminal symbols and non-terminal production rules which are the restrictions governing how terminal symbols can be combined into a valid sequence. Examples of terminal symbols include alphanumeric characters, punctuation marks, and whitespace characters.
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.
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