Syntax Definition Research Articles

Syntax in animal communication: its study in songbirds and other taxa

Many building blocks of human language can be found within the vocal communication systems of other species, most notably songbirds. One of the most prominent of these building blocks is syntax. While studies of syntax are abundant, a lack of consensus on the definition of syntax in non‐human animal communication studies has led to much debate. Consistent and deliberate use of terminology is needed to facilitate understanding across disciplines. In addition, new terminology may better describe syntactic structure found in vocal signals that are devoid of semantic associations, such as birdsong. Here, we propose two terms to describe the types of syntax commonly found in birdsong: sequential syntax and dialectical syntax. Sequential syntax can be defined as the rules that govern the patterns of sound without regard to semantic meaning. Dialectic syntax can be defined as sequential syntax that is distinct among different populations or groups with behavioral significance for those groups. Taken together, these two terms can describe the type of syntax seen in ornamental signals, such as birdsong.

La syntaxe sémiologique de L. J. Prieto

The article revisits a proposal by Luís J. Prieto for the (re)definition of syntax, dated 1988-1989. Prieto’s idea deserves to be reclaimed for multiple reasons: the resemblance of what he calls “phonological syntax” with what is called today “prosodic phonology”; the way in which it helps to understand the Hjelmslevian principle of biplanarity (heteroplane function); and, most of all, its semiotic value, which goes beyond the strictly linguistic level and makes it a fundamental notion for a semiotic theory of knowledge.

Language-parametric static semantic code completion

Code completion is an editor service in IDEs that proposes code fragments for the user to insert at the caret position in their code. Code completion should be sound and complete. It should be sound, such that it only proposes fragments that do not violate the syntactic and static semantic rules of the language. It should be complete, such that it proposes all valid fragments so that code completion can be used to construct all programs. To realize soundness and completeness, code completion should be informed by the language definition. In practice, the implementation of code completion is an additional effort in the implementation of a language. In this paper, we develop a framework for language-parametric semantic code completion for statically typed programming languages based on their specification of syntax and static semantics, realizing the implementation of a code completion editor service with minimal additional effort. The framework builds on the SDF3 syntax definition formalism and the Statix static semantics specification language. The algorithm reinterprets the static semantics definition to find sound expansions of predicates and solutions to name resolution queries in scope graphs. This allows a search strategy to explore the solution space and synthesize completion proposals. The implementation of the strategy language and code completion algorithm extend the implementation of the Statix solver, and can be used for any language defined in Statix. We demonstrate soundness and completeness of the completion proposal synthesis, and evaluate its performance.

The execution complexity of logical formulas with restricted quantifiers based on CF-grammars

The polynomial realized formulas are introduced with quantifiers acting on hierarchy lists described by CF-grammars. Upper estimates of execution complexity are obtained depending from the sort of grammar. These formulas have been applied for formal definition of context-dependent syntax of programming languages and describing dynamic discrete system.

Association of peri-procedural myocardial infarction with mortality after stenting true coronary bifurcation lesions: A pooled individual participant data analysis from four randomized controlled trials.

Five definitions of peri-procedural myocardial infarction (PMI) following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) are used in clinical trials; their clinical relevance in coronary bifurcation stenting remains unclear. To understand the correlation between PMI and mortality in bifurcation lesions from the DKCRUSH studies. PMI was defined using serum creatine kinase-myocardial band (CK-MB) values within 48 h of PCI according to the SYNTAX, Fourth Universal Definition of MI (4th UDMI), ISCHEMIA, SCAI, and EXCEL definitions. Overall, 1300 patients with both CK and CK-MB measurements pre- and post-stenting were evaluated. The association of each PMI type and all-cause death or cardiac death at a median of 5.58 years of follow-up was analyzed using Cox regression. In total, 56 (4.3%) patients had PMI. According to SYNTAX, 4th UDMI or ISCHEMIA, SCAI, and EXCEL definitions, PMI occurred in 21 (1.6%), 56 (4.3%), 29 (2.2%), and 32 (2.5%) patients, respectively. All definitions were significantly correlated with unadjusted mortality at the end of follow-up but not at 30 days or 1-year after stenting. PMI using SYNTAX, SCAI, and EXCEL definitions rather than 4th UDMI definition was strongly associated with adjusted all-cause death. By adjusted analysis, PMI according to 4th UDMI, SCAI, and EXCEL definitions but not SYNTAX definition was positively correlated with cardiac death at a median of 5.58 years of follow-up. CK-MB ≥ 5 x UNL strongly enhanced the correlation of CK-MB values with mortality. PMI rate varies with the definition following stenting for bifurcation lesions. PMI defined by SCAI and EXCEL definitions is strongly correlates with adjusted all-cause and cardiac death.

EXPLANATION OF SYNTAX WITH THE HELP OF SIMPLE EXAMPLES

This article explains the definition of syntax, content words and functional words, syntactical construction and its types.

Touch: A Textual Programming Language for Developing APPs of Insect Intelligent Building

Insect intelligent building (I2B) is a novel decentralized, flat-structured intelligent building platform with excellent flexibility and scalability. I2B allows users to develop applications that include control strategies for efficiently managing and controlling buildings. However, developing I2B APPs (applications) is considered a challenging and complex task due to the complex structural features and parallel computing models of the I2B platform. Existing studies have been shown to encounter difficulty in supporting a high degree of abstraction and in allowing users to define control scenarios in a concise and comprehensible way. This paper aims to facilitate the development of such applications and to reduce the programming difficulty. We propose Touch, a textual domain-specific language (DSL) that provides a high-level abstraction of I2B APPs. Specifically, we first establish the conceptual programming architecture of the I2B APP, making the application more intuitive by abstracting different levels of physical entities in I2B. Then, we present special language elements to effectively support the parallel computing model of the I2B platform and provide a formal definition of the concrete Touch syntax. We also implement supporting tools for Touch, including a development environment as well as target code generation. Finally, we present experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Touch.

CRUDyLeaf: A DSL for Generating Spring Boot REST APIs from Entity CRUD Operations

Abstract Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are programming languages designed specifically to express solutions to problems in a particular domain. It is said they foster productivity and quality. In this work we describe CRUDyLeaf, a DSL focused on the generation of Spring Boot REST APIs from entity CRUD operations. Spring Boot is an open source Java-based framework used to implement the REST architecture style. It has gained popularity among developers mainly because it allows to build stand-alone and production ready software applications (avoiding the use of an application server). Through seven proposed stages (domain immersion, golden application implementation, syntax definition, meta model generation, code generator implementation, deployment, and refinement) we describe the development of this DSL. We also exemplify and evaluate the proposed DSL. Our findings suggest a yield automation rate of 32.1 LOC (Lines Of Code) for each LOC written in this DSL, among other observed benefits.

Abstract-Syntax-Driven Development of Oberon-0 Using YAJCo

YAJCo is a tool for the development of software languages based on an annotated language model. The model is represented by Java classes with annotations defining their mapping to concrete syntax. This approach to language definition enables the abstract syntax to be central point of the development process, instead of concrete syntax. In this paper a case study of Oberon-0 programming language development is presented. The study is based on the LTDA Tool Challenge and showcases details of abstract and concrete syntax definition using YAJCo, as well as implementation of name resolution, type checking, model transformation and code generation. The language was implemented in modular fashion to demonstrate language extension mechanisms supported by YAJCo.

Definition of Natural Languages Using Context-free Grammer: In Context of Dari Language

Formal definition of a natural language lets computers understand it; the languages have challenging complexity to come under representation of any formal language. Modeling assumptions, using formal languages, we can approximate the languages; and better approximation we do, more complexities of formal languages are resolved. Objective is to study current researches and possibilities to model Dari as a context-free language. Researchers have worked for more than 6 decades on definition of syntax of natural languages using context-free grammer. It is crucial that computer scientists to be able to thoroughly understand about which category of formal languages the natural language exist in in. In overall, our skill to decide the grammar type of natural languages performs a significant role in our capability to parse it. This review article concludes that discussed issue of the context-freeness of a certain language is regularly reliant on upon the level of complexity of the language. The common of languages investigated in this regard are languages of European family and Indo-Aryan languages liker Dari, Arabic and Pashto have not been adequately fortunate to be devoted thorough researches in this regard.

SIAS-miner: mining subjectively interesting attributed subgraphs

Data clustering, local pattern mining, and community detection in graphs are three mature areas of data mining and machine learning. In recent years, attributed subgraph mining has emerged as a new powerful data mining task in the intersection of these areas. Given a graph and a set of attributes for each vertex, attributed subgraph mining aims to find cohesive subgraphs for which (some of) the attribute values have exceptional values. The principled integration of graph and attribute data poses two challenges: (1) the definition of a pattern syntax (the abstract form of patterns) that is intuitive and lends itself to efficient search, and (2) the formalization of the interestingness of such patterns. We propose an integrated solution to both of these challenges. The proposed pattern syntax improves upon prior work in being both highly flexible and intuitive. Plus, we define an effective and principled algorithm to enumerate patterns of this syntax. The proposed approach for quantifying interestingness of these patterns is rooted in information theory, and is able to account for background knowledge on the data. While prior work quantified the interestingness for the cohesion of the subgraph and for the exceptionality of its attributes separately, then combining these in a parameterized trade-off, we instead handle this trade-off implicitly in a principled, parameter-free manner. Empirical results confirm we can efficiently find highly interesting subgraphs.

Study on Meta-Modeling Method for Performance Analysis of Digital Power Plant

Abstract Digital power plant is the theory and method to improve the operating quality of power plant by quantifying, analyzing, controlling, and deciding the physical and working objects of power plants in the whole life cycle. And the foundation of digital power plant is system modeling and performance analysis. However, there are some problems in the process of modeling establishment and performance analysis. For instance, each component has different dimensions and different types of mathematical description, and the data or information used for modeling are defined differently and belong to different enterprises, who do not want to share their information. Meta-modeling is a potential method to solve these problems. It defines the specification to describe different kinds of elements and the relationship between different elements. In this paper, the collaborative modeling and simulation platform for digital power plant has been established based on the meta-modeling method and the performance of the target power plant has been analyzed from different aspects via field data. The meta-modeling method consists of three parts: syntax definition, model development, and algorithm definition. In the comparative study between the meta-model and the traditional model, maximum average errors of the two methods are 8.72% and 4.74%, which reveals the high accuracy of the meta-modeling-based model. The result shows that the modeling and simulation platform for power plants can be used to reduce costs, decrease equipment failure rate, and improve plant output, so as to guarantee the safety and increase economics.

Towards Zero-Overhead Disambiguation of Deep Priority Conflicts

**Context** Context-free grammars are widely used for language prototyping and implementation. They allow formalizing the syntax of domain-specific or general-purpose programming languages concisely and declaratively. However, the natural and concise way of writing a context-free grammar is often ambiguous. Therefore, grammar formalisms support extensions in the form of *declarative disambiguation rules* to specify operator precedence and associativity, solving ambiguities that are caused by the subset of the grammar that corresponds to expressions. **Inquiry** Implementing support for declarative disambiguation within a parser typically comes with one or more of the following limitations in practice: a lack of parsing performance, or a lack of modularity (i.e., disallowing the composition of grammar fragments of potentially different languages). The latter subject is generally addressed by scannerless generalized parsers. We aim to equip scannerless generalized parsers with novel disambiguation methods that are inherently performant, without compromising the concerns of modularity and language composition. **Approach** In this paper, we present a novel low-overhead implementation technique for disambiguating deep associativity and priority conflicts in scannerless generalized parsers with lightweight data-dependency. **Knowledge** Ambiguities with respect to operator precedence and associativity arise from combining the various operators of a language. While *shallow conflicts* can be resolved efficiently by one-level tree patterns, *deep conflicts* require more elaborate techniques, because they can occur arbitrarily nested in a tree. Current state-of-the-art approaches to solving deep priority conflicts come with a severe performance overhead. **Grounding** We evaluated our new approach against state-of-the-art declarative disambiguation mechanisms. By parsing a corpus of popular open-source repositories written in Java and OCaml, we found that our approach yields speedups of up to 1.73x over a grammar rewriting technique when parsing programs with deep priority conflicts--with a modest overhead of 1-2 % when parsing programs without deep conflicts. **Importance** A recent empirical study shows that deep priority conflicts are indeed wide-spread in real-world programs. The study shows that in a corpus of popular OCaml projects on Github, up to 17 % of the source files contain deep priority conflicts. However, there is no solution in the literature that addresses efficient disambiguation of deep priority conflicts, with support for modular and composable syntax definitions.

Metamodel specialization for graphical language support

Most of current modeling languages are based on graphical diagrams. The concrete graphical syntax of these languages typically is defined informally—by text and diagram examples. Only recently, starting from UML 2.5, a formalism is offered for defining the graphical syntax of UML. This formalism is based on Diagram Definition standard by OMG, where the main emphasis is on enabling diagram interchange between different tools implementing the given language. While this is crucial for standardized languages such as UML, this aspect is not so important for domain-specific languages. In this paper, an approach is offered for a simple direct definition of concrete graphical syntax by means of metamodels. Metamodels are typically used for a language definition, but mainly the MOF-inspired approach via meta-metamodel instantiation is used. We offer an alternative approach based on core metamodel specialization which leads to a more direct and understandable definition staying at the same meta-layer. In addition, our approach permits a natural extension—facility for a graphical editor definition for the given language, which is vital in the world of DSLs. In contrast to most DSL development platforms, which are based on the abstract syntax metamodel of the language and a mapping to graphics, our facility is based directly on the graphical syntax. But we show that in those cases where the relation to the DSL abstract syntax is really required, a mapping from the graphical syntax to abstract syntax can be relatively easily defined by the specialization approach.

Intrinsically-typed definitional interpreters for imperative languages

A definitional interpreter defines the semantics of an object language in terms of the (well-known) semantics of a host language, enabling understanding and validation of the semantics through execution. Combining a definitional interpreter with a separate type system requires a separate type safety proof. An alternative approach, at least for pure object languages, is to use a dependently-typed language to encode the object language type system in the definition of the abstract syntax. Using such intrinsically-typed abstract syntax definitions allows the host language type checker to verify automatically that the interpreter satisfies type safety. Does this approach scale to larger and more realistic object languages, and in particular to languages with mutable state and objects? In this paper, we describe and demonstrate techniques and libraries in Agda that successfully scale up intrinsically-typed definitional interpreters to handle rich object languages with non-trivial binding structures and mutable state. While the resulting interpreters are certainly more complex than the simply-typed λ-calculus interpreter we start with, we claim that they still meet the goals of being concise, comprehensible, and executable, while guaranteeing type safety for more elaborate object languages. We make the following contributions: (1) A dependent-passing style technique for hiding the weakening of indexed values as they propagate through monadic code. (2) An Agda library for programming with scope graphs and frames , which provides a uniform approach to dealing with name binding in intrinsically-typed interpreters. (3) Case studies of intrinsically-typed definitional interpreters for the simply-typed λ-calculus with references (STLC+Ref) and for a large subset of Middleweight Java (MJ).

Shaping ideal cities: The graph representation of the urban utopia

The ideal Renaissance city is designed as a star-shaped fortress, where the streets and squares are organized to speed the movement of people and soldiers. Symmetry and accessibility represent the key features for the organization of the urban space. The resulting city is hierarchized and does not always guarantee an optimal degree of connectivity. Starting from the space syntax definition, we suggest a method to compute urban graphs from the Euclidean representation, the corresponding line graph and the contraction of nodes with the same urban function. We analyze the urban graphs of five historic cities and compare the analysis with the corresponding results from space syntax. Analysis of the spectral gap and the relative asymmetry distribution show a similar structure for these cities. The irregular or reticular housing structure seems to ensure connectivity and accessibility more than the regular grids. However, connectivity is ensured by the most peripheral streets, which in the space syntax representation play a marginal role.

Categorical model of structural operational semantics for imperative language

Definition of programming languages consists of the formal definition of syntax and semantics. One of the most popular semantic methods used in various stages of software engineering is structural operational semantics. It describes program behavior in the form of state changes after execution of elementary steps of program. This feature makes structural operational semantics useful for implementation of programming languages and also for verification purposes. In our paper we present a new approach to structural operational semantics. We model behavior of programs in category of states, where objects are states, an abstraction of computer memory and morphisms model state changes, execution of a program in elementary steps. The advantage of using categorical model is its exact mathematical structure with many useful proved properties and its graphical illustration of program behavior as a path, i.e. a composition of morphisms. Our approach is able to accentuate dynamics of structural operational semantics. For simplicity, we assume that data are intuitively typed. Visualization and facility of our model is not only a new model of structural operational semantics of imperative programming languages but it can also serve for education purposes.

A navigational role-centric model oriented web approach - MoWebA

This study presents MoWebA, a navigational role-centric model driven development MDD proposal for web applications development. The approach was conceived considering a previous study of web methods and analysing some open issues. This article presents the fundamentals of the proposal; the methodological aspects for modelling and transformation processes; and the defined notations/techniques for modelling and transformation tasks, including their abstract and concrete syntax definitions. We include a summary of the validation experiences and main results, and a comparison against other related proposals, in order to highlight the main contributions of MoWebA.

Modular language implementation in Rascal – experience report

All software evolves, and programming languages and programming language tools are no exception. And just like in ordinary software construction, modular implementations can help ease the process of changing a language implementation and its dependent tools. However, the syntactic and semantic dependencies between language features make this a challenging problem. In this paper we detail how programming languages can be implemented in a modular fashion using the Rascal meta-programming language. Rascal supports extensible definition of concrete syntax, abstract syntax and operations on concrete and abstract syntax trees like matching, traversal and transformation. As a result, new language features can be added without having to change existing code. As a case study, we detail our solution of the LDTA'11 Tool Challenge: a modular implementation of Oberon-0, a relatively simple imperative programming language. The approach we sketch can be applied equally well to the implementation of domain-specific languages.

The logical and the analytic

This paper considers various objections to Carnap’s logical syntax definition of ’logical expression’, including those by Saunders Mac Lane and W. V. O. Quine. While the specific objections of these two authors can be answered, if necessary by a slight modification of Carnap’s definition, there are other objections that I do not see how to meet. I also consider the proposal by Denis Bonnay for avoiding the objections to Carnap’s definition. In light of the unresolved problems with Carnap’s definition, I go on to consider what Carnap’s assumptions must have been in framing his definition and to assess how much damage is caused by this failure of Carnap’s definition. This damage is not as much as might be assumed.