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Parser Uses A CFG

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18 views

Parser Uses A CFG

Uploaded by

imtiazroy000
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Parser uses a CFG(Context-free-Grammar) to validate the input string and

produce output for the next phase of the compiler. Output could be either a
parse tree or an abstract syntax tree. Now to interleave semantic analysis
with the syntax analysis phase of the compiler, we use Syntax Directed
Translation.

Conceptually, with both syntax-directed definition and translation schemes,


we parse the input token stream, build the parse tree, and then traverse the
tree as needed to evaluate the semantic rules at the parse tree nodes.
Evaluation of the semantic rules may generate code, save information in a
symbol table, issue error messages, or perform any other activities. The
translation of the token stream is the result obtained by evaluating the
semantic rules.
Definition
Syntax Directed Translation has augmented rules to the grammar that
facilitate semantic analysis. SDT involves passing information bottom-up
and/or top-down to the parse tree in form of attributes attached to the
nodes. Syntax-directed translation rules use 1) lexical values of nodes, 2)
constants & 3) attributes associated with the non-terminals in their
definitions.
The general approach to Syntax-Directed Translation is to construct a parse
tree or syntax tree and compute the values of attributes at the nodes of the
tree by visiting them in some order. In many cases, translation can be done
during parsing without building an explicit tree.
Example
E -> E+T | T
T -> T*F | F
F -> INTLIT

This is a grammar to syntactically validate an expression having additions


and multiplications in it. Now, to carry out semantic analysis we will
augment SDT rules to this grammar, in order to pass some information up
the parse tree and check for semantic errors, if any. In this example, we will
focus on the evaluation of the given expression, as we don’t have any
semantic assertions to check in this very basic example.

E -> E+T { E.val = E.val + T.val } PR#1


E -> T { E.val = T.val } PR#2
T -> T*F { T.val = T.val * F.val } PR#3
T -> F { T.val = F.val } PR#4
F -> INTLIT { F.val = INTLIT.lexval } PR#5

For understanding translation rules further, we take the first SDT


augmented to [ E -> E+T ] production rule. The translation rule in
consideration has val as an attribute for both the non-terminals – E & T.
Right-hand side of the translation rule corresponds to attribute values of
the right-side nodes of the production rule and vice-versa. Generalizing,
SDT are augmented rules to a CFG that associate 1) set of attributes to
every node of the grammar and 2) a set of translation rules to every
production rule using attributes, constants, and lexical values.
Let’s take a string to see how semantic analysis happens – S = 2+3*4. Parse
tree corresponding to S would be

To evaluate translation rules, we can employ one depth-first search


traversal on the parse tree. This is possible only because SDT rules don’t
impose any specific order on evaluation until children’s attributes are
computed before parents for a grammar having all synthesized attributes.
Otherwise, we would have to figure out the best-suited plan to traverse
through the parse tree and evaluate all the attributes in one or more
traversals. For better understanding, we will move bottom-up in the left to
right fashion for computing the translation rules of our example.

The above diagram shows how semantic analysis could happen. The flow of
information happens bottom-up and all the children’s attributes are
computed before parents, as discussed above. Right-hand side nodes are
sometimes annotated with subscript 1 to distinguish between children and
parents.
Additional Information
Synthesized Attributes are such attributes that depend only on the
attribute values of children nodes.
Thus [ E -> E+T { E.val = E.val + T.val } ] has a synthesized attribute val
corresponding to node E. If all the semantic attributes in an augmented
grammar are synthesized, one depth-first search traversal in any order is
sufficient for the semantic analysis phase.
Inherited Attributes are such attributes that depend on parent and/or
sibling’s attributes.
Thus [ Ep -> E+T { Ep.val = E.val + T.val, T.val = Ep.val } ], where E & Ep are
same production symbols annotated to differentiate between parent and
child, has an inherited attribute val corresponding to node T.

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