Chapter 2. Grammars
Grammar, which knows how to control even kings . . . | ||
| --Molière, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), Act II, scene vi | ||
This chapter describes the context-free grammars used in this specification to define the lexical and syntactic structure of a program.
Context-Free Grammars
A context-free grammar consists of a number of productions. Each production has an abstract symbol called a nonterminal as its left-hand side, and a sequence of one or more nonterminal and terminal symbols as its right-hand side. For each grammar, the terminal symbols are drawn from a specified alphabet.
Starting from a sentence consisting of a single distinguished nonterminal, called the goal symbol, a given context-free grammar specifies a language, namely, the ...
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