review-learngroup.pptVIP

Dangling else x := 3 if x 2 then if x 4 then x := 1 else x := 5 So what is x? Ambiguous grammar statement := IF expression THEN statement | IF expression THEN statement ELSE statement | otherstatement Unambiguous grammar statement := st1 | st2 st1 := IF expression THEN st1 ELSE st1 | otherstatement st2 := IF expression THEN statement | IF expression THEN st1 ELSE st2 Ambiguous vs. unambiguous Exercise Show that the following grammar is ambiguous. S ? AB | aaB A ? a | Aa B ? b Construct an equivalent grammar that is unambiguous. Parsing In practical applications, it is usually not enough to decide whether a string belongs to a language. It is also important to know how to derive the string from the language. Parsing uncovers the syntactical structure of a string, which is represented by a parse tree. (The syntactical structure is important for assigning semantics to the string -- for example, if it is a program). Parsing Let G be a context-free grammar for C++. Let the string w be a C++ program. One thing a compiler does -- in particular, the part of the compiler called the “parser” -- is determine whether w is a syntactically correct C++ program. It also constructs a parse tree for the program that is used in code generation. There are many sophisticated and efficient algorithms for parsing. You may study them in more advanced classes (for example, on compilers) or come across them on your own. We will not discuss them in this class. Theorem 3.3 Every language generated by a right-linear grammar is regular. Proof: Specify a procedure for automatically constructing an NFA that mimics the derivations of a right-linear grammar. Theorem 3.3 Justification: The sentential forms produced by a right linear grammar have exactly one variable, which occurs as the rightmost symbol. Assume that our grammar has a production rule D ? dE and that, during the derivation of