Restricting grammars with tree automata
Abstract
Precedence and associativity declarations in systems like yacc resolve ambiguities in context-free grammars (CFGs) by specifying restrictions on allowed parses. However, they are special purpose and do not handle the grammatical restrictions that language designers need in order to resolve ambiguities like dangling else, the interactions between binary operators and functional if expressions in ML, and the interactions between object allocation and function calls in JavaScript. Often, language designers resort to restructuring their grammars in order to encode these restrictions, but this obfuscates the designer's intent and can make grammars more difficult to read, write, and maintain.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 12, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3133906
Entities
People
- Matthew Might
- Michael D. Adams
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- University of Utah