Re: Crenshaw's Tutorial

John wrote:
>
> [Please, let's not get into hair-splitting arguments about what's the
> syntax and what's the semantics.


Indeed. Old terminology separates "syntax" (CFG), "static semantics"
(declaration rules) and "semantics" (effect of statements).


> I don't know of any parser that attempts
> to enforce redeclaration rules syntactically.


I don't know whether this was ever built into a compiler, but van
Wijngarden "two-level grammars" can indeed handle variable declaration
rules (including type rules).
Two-level grammars are not context-free but context-sensitive (one step
further down in the Chomsky hierarchy), but they are so regular that I
suspect that they should be tractable using automated tools (in fact I
just found a mention of "Extended Affix Grammars" which seem to be an
automatizable relative of vWGs).
(Here's a reference to two-level grammars in general:
http://iecc.com/comparch/article/94-06-107. A bit old, but...)


Regards,
Joachim
[I was under the impression that practical Algol68 compilers flattened the
grammar and used more conventional parsers, but I haven't looked into it
enough to be sure. -John]

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