The theory of parsing is an important application area of the theory of formal languages and automata. The evolution of modem high-level programming languages created a need for a general and theoretically dean methodology for writing compilers for these languages. It was perceived that the compilation process had to be "syntax-directed", that is, the functioning of a programming language compiler had to be defined completely by the underlying formal syntax of the language. A program text to be compiled is "parsed" according to the syntax of the language, and the object code for the program is generated according to the semantics attached to the parsed syntactic entities. Context-free grammars were soon found to be the most convenient formalism for describing the syntax of programming languages, and accordingly methods for parsing context-free languages were devel oped. Practical considerations led to the definition of various kinds of restricted context-free grammars that are parsable by means of efficient deterministic linear-time algorithms.

Autorentext

Seppo Sippu is Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, and Eljas Soisalon-Soininen is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Aalto University School of Science. They started their co-work already in the 1970s on the area of compiler construction and parsing. This work culminated in the two-volume book "Parsing Theory" published by Springer 1988 and 1990. Already in the 1980s they gradually moved to data structures and algorithms, and also to databases and indexing, partly inspired by the visit of Dr. Soisalon-Soininen at the University of Karlsruhe as a Humboldt grantee. One important topic in the most recent work has been incorporating index operations into database transactions allowing uniform treatment of them both. Sippu and Soisalon-Soininen have published many articles in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, such as Journal of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, The VLDB Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Inhalt

1. Elements of Language Theory.- 1.1 Mathematical Preliminaries.- 1.2 Languages.- 1.3 Random Access Machines.- 1.4 Decision Problems.- 1.5 Computational Complexity.- 1.6 Rewriting Systems.- Exercises.- Bibliographic Notes.- 2. Algorithms on Graphs.- 2.1 Basic Algorithms.- 2.2 Finding Strongly Connected Components.- 2.3 Computing Functions Defined on Graphs.- 2.4 Computing Relational Expressions.- Exercises.- Bibliographic Notes.- 3. Regular Languages.- 3.1 Regular Expressions.- 3.2 Finite Automata.- 3.3 Regular Grammars.- 3.4 Deterministic Finite Automata.- 3.5 Decision Problems on Regular Languages.- 3.6 Applications to Lexical Analysis.- Exercises.- Bibliographic Notes.- 4. Context-free Languages.- 4.1 Context-free Grammars.- 4.2 Leftmost and Rightmost Derivations.- 4.3 Ambiguity of Grammars.- 4.4 Useless and Nullable Symbols.- 4.5 Canonical Two-form Grammars.- 4.6 Derivational Complexity.- 4.7 Context-free Language Recognition.- Exercises.- Bibliographic Notes.- 5. Parsing.- 5.1 Pushdown Automata.- 5.2 Left Parsers and Right Parsers.- 5.3 Strong LL(k) Parsing.- 5.4 Strong LL(k) Grammars.- 5.5 Construction of Strong LL(1) Parsers.- 5.6 Implementation of Strong LL(1) Parsers.- 5.7 Simple Precedence Parsing.- Exercises.- Bibliographic Notes.- Bibliography to Volume I.- Index to Volume I.