Re: SLR parse table question

Michael Mstowski <msm@spaceworks.com> writes:


>I'm trying to understand how to construct a SLR parse table and am
>having difficulty building the canonical set of items. The dragon
>book shows an algorithm, then magically generates the entire canonical
>set. I don't know how the I(n) items are generated from I(1) and
>can't determine how the 'dot' is placed. I know how to find the
>closure, but after that, things get a bit fuzzy.


You can try looking in Andrew Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation
in [ML/C/Java]" (these are three similar books, only differing in the
language used for examples). I find the explanation of SLR
construction much more readable than in the Dragon Book. One reason
for this is that it much more clearly separates _what_ you have to do
from _how_ you do it. That said, the Dragon books has a lot more
detail about things like table compression etc, which may be
interesting when you actually have to write a compiler for a language
with a large syntax (e.g. Cobol). These subjects are, however, fairly
unimportant for an intuitive understanding of the algorithms.


Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)
--

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