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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 ...
Terminal symbols are the concrete characters or strings of characters (for example keywords such as define, if, let, or void) from which syntactically valid programs are constructed. Syntax can be divided into context-free syntax and context-sensitive syntax. [7] Context-free syntax are rules directed by the metalanguage of the programming ...
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.
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:
Naur changed two of Backus's symbols to commonly available characters. The ::= symbol was originally a :≡. The | symbol was originally the word "or" (with a bar over it). [9]: 14 BNF is very similar to canonical-form Boolean algebra equations that are, and were at the time, used in logic-circuit design. Backus was a mathematician and the ...
The language generated by a grammar is the set of all strings of terminal symbols that can be derived, by repeated rule applications, from some particular nonterminal symbol ("start symbol"). Nonterminal symbols are used during the derivation process, but do not appear in its final result string.
The right side may be the empty string, or a single terminal symbol, or a single terminal symbol followed by a nonterminal symbol, but nothing else. (Sometimes a broader definition is used: one can allow longer strings of terminals or single nonterminals without anything else, making languages easier to denote while still defining the same ...