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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 ...
is the set of terminal symbols; is the set of productions; is the distinguished, or start, symbol; Then, given a string of nonterminal symbols and an attribute name , . is a synthesized attribute if all three of these conditions are met:
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.
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.
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
<symbol> [2] is a nonterminal variable that is always enclosed between the pair <>. ::= means that the symbol on the left must be replaced with the expression on the right. __expression__ consists of one or more sequences of either terminal or nonterminal symbols where each sequence is separated by a vertical bar "|" indicating a choice , the ...
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.