Exploratory Steps Towards a Grammatical Manipulation Package (GRAMPA)

Abstract

<p>Very often, grammars constructed for computer languages are not in a concise form for simple parsing. For example some symbols may be unreachable or useless. If a simple precedence grammar is required, artificial symbols may have to be introduced to remove conflicts. This report describes exploratory steps taken towards the development of an Algol program to automatically manipulate grammars. Procedures are described which read and set up a grammar in a list structure form suitable for analysis and manipulation. The procedures manipulate the grammar to remove useless and unreachable symbols, and precedence conflicts, and they analyse the grammar for recursion, precedence etc.</p>