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Semantic evaluation from left to right

Author:

Gregor V. BochmannAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 19, Issue 2

Pages 55 - 62

https://doi.org/10.1145/359997.359999

Published: 01 February 1976 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes attribute grammars and their use for the definition of programming languages and compilers; a formal definition of attribute grammars and a discussion of some of its important aspects are included. The paper concentrates on the evaluation of semantic attributes in a few passes from left to right over the derivation tree of a program. A condition for an attribute grammar is given which assures that the semantics of any program can be evaluated in a single pass over the derivation tree, and an algorithm is discussed which decides how many passes from left to right are in general necessary, given the attribute grammar. These notions are explained in terms of an example grammar which describes the scope rules of Algol 60. Practical questions, such as the relative efficiency of different evaluation schemes, and the ease of adapting the attribute grammar of a given programming language to the left-to-right evaluation scheme are discussed.

References

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Knuth, D.E. Semantics of context-free languages. Math Systems Th. 2 (1968), 127-145. Correction appears in Math. Systems Th. 5 (1971),95.

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Knuth, D.E. Examples of formal semantics, In Lecture Notes in Mathemetics No. 188, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1971.

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Bochmann, G.V. Semantic equivalence of syntactically related attribute grammars. Publ. No. 148, D6partement d'Informatique, U. de Montreal, Nov. 1973.

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Wilner, W.T. Declarative semantic definition. Rep. STAN-CS- 233-71, Computer Science Dep., Stanford U., 1971. Also Wilner, W.T. Formal semantic definition using synthesized and inherited attributes. In Formal Semantics of Programming Languages, R. Rustin (Ed.), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972.

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Koster, C.H.A. Affix grammars. In Algol 68 Implementation, North-Holland Pub. Co., Amsterdam, 1971. See also: Crowe, D. Generating parsers for affix grammars. Comm. ACM 15 (1972), 728-732.

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Morris, J.H. Jr. Types are not sets. In Proceedings of the ACM Syrup. on Principles of Programming Languages, Boston, 1973, pp. 120-124.

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Fang, I. FOLDS, a declarative formal language definition system. Rep. STAN-CS-72-329, Computer Science Dep., Stanford U., 1972.

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Lewis, P.M., Rosenkrantz, D.J., and Stearns, R.E. Attributed translations. To be published in J. Computer and Systems Sci.

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Jazayeri, M., Ogden, W.F., and Rounds, W.C. On the Complexity of the circularity test for attribute grammars. In Conf. Record, ACM Syrup. on Principles of Programming Languages, Palo Alto, Calif., Jan. 20-22, 1975, pp. 119-129.

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Neel, D., and Amirchahy, M. Semantic attributes and improvement of generated code. In Proc. ACM Congress 1974, San Diego, Calif., Nov. 1974, pp. 1-10.

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Index Terms

Semantic evaluation from left to right
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory
    1. Grammars and context-free languages

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM Volume 19, Issue 2

Feb. 1976

53 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/359997

Editor:
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1976 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 February 1976

Published in CACM Volume 19, Issue 2

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Sebastio SAmoretti MLafuente AScala A(2018)A Holistic Approach for Collaborative Workload Execution in Volunteer CloudsACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/315533628:2(1-27)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3155336
Marin ARossi SBurato DSina ASottana M(2018)A Product-Form Model for the Performance Evaluation of a Bandwidth Allocation Strategy in WSNsACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/315533528:2(1-23)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3155335
Gebhardt KNederhof MVogler H(2017)Hybrid Grammars for Parsing of Discontinuous Phrase Structures and Non-Projective Dependency StructuresComputational Linguistics10.1162/COLI_a_0029143:3(465-520)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00291
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van Binsbergen LBransen JDijkstra AAsai KSagonas K(2015)Linearly Ordered Attribute GrammarsProceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/2678015.2682543(49-60)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2015
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