The parsing problem for affix grammars

Abstract

Affix grammars are an extension of context-free grammars which retain most of their advantages and eliminate most of their limitations with respect to the definition of programming languages and the specification of their translators. The extension allows definition of context-sensitive syntax features, and also allows semantics to be linked to syntax. In this paper, the parsing problem for affix grammars is explored and shown to be closely related to the parsing problem for context-free grammars. This enables a standard context-free parser constructor to be generalised to a constructor for affix grammars, essentially by addition of a preprocessor. The resulting constructors are compared with previously implemented or proposed constructors.