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Terminal symbols are the elementary symbols of the language defined as part of a formal grammar. Nonterminal symbols (or syntactic variables) are replaced by groups of terminal symbols according to the production rules. The terminals and nonterminals of a particular grammar are in two completely separate sets.
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
EBNF is a code that expresses the syntax of a formal language. [5] 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.
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]
The packrat parser takes in input the same syntax as PEGs: a simple PEG is composed of terminal and nonterminal symbols, possibly interleaved with operators that compose one or several derivation rules. [2]
Unlike a semi-Thue system, which is wholly defined by these rules, a grammar further distinguishes between two kinds of symbols: nonterminal and terminal symbols; each left-hand side must contain at least one nonterminal symbol. It also distinguishes a special nonterminal symbol, called the start symbol.
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.