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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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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