Bounded context syntactic analysis

Abstract

Certain phase structure grammars define languages in which the phrasehood and structure of a substring of a sentence may be determined by consideration of only a bounded context of the substring. It is possible to determine, for any specified bound on the number of contextual characters considered, whether a given grammar is such a bounded context grammar . Such grammars are free from syntactic ambiguity. Syntactic analysis of sentences in a bounded context language may be performed by a standard process and requires a number of operations proportional to the length of sentence analyzed. Bounded context grammars form models for most languages used in computer programming, and many methods of syntactic analysis, including analysis by operator precedence, are special cases of bounded context analysis.