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Parsing Expression Grammar
In computer science, a parsing expression grammar (PEG) is a type of analytic formal grammar, i.e. it describes a formal language in terms of a set of rules for recognizing strings in the language. The formalism was introduced by Bryan Ford in 2004 and is closely related to the family of top-down parsing languages introduced in the early 1970s. Syntactically, PEGs also look similar to context-free grammars (CFGs), but they have a different interpretation: the choice operator selects the first match in PEG, while it is ambiguous in CFG. This is closer to how string recognition tends to be done in practice, e.g. by a recursive descent parser. Unlike CFGs, PEGs cannot be ambiguous; a string has exactly one valid parse tree or none. It is conjectured that there exist context-free languages that cannot be recognized by a PEG, but this is not yet proven. PEGs are well-suited to parsing computer languages (and artificial human languages such as Lojban), but not natural languages where ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Computer science is generally considered an area of academic research and distinct from computer programming. Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science. The theory of computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes of problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer security involve studying the means for secure communication and for preventing security vulnerabilities. Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation of images. Programming language theory considers different ways to describe computational processes, and database theory concerns the management of repositories o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Regular Expression
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. Regular expression techniques are developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory. The concept of regular expressions began in the 1950s, when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the concept of a regular language. They came into common use with Unix text-processing utilities. Different syntaxes for writing regular expressions have existed since the 1980s, one being the POSIX standard and another, widely used, being the Perl syntax. Regular expressions are used in search engines, in search and replace dialogs of word processors and text editors, in text processing utilities such as sed and AWK, and in lexical analysis. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Grammar
In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. A formal grammar is defined as a set of production rules for such strings in a formal language. Formal language theory, the discipline that studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas. A formal grammar is a set of rules for rewriting strings, along with a "start symbol" from which rewriting starts. Therefore, a grammar is usually thought of as a language generator. However, it can also sometimes be used as the basis for a " recognizer"—a function in computing that det ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dangling Else
The dangling else is a problem in programming of parser generators in which an optional else clause in an if–then(–else) statement results in nested conditionals being ambiguous. Formally, the reference context-free grammar of the language is ambiguous, meaning there is more than one correct parse tree. In many programming languages one may write conditionally executed code in two forms: the if-then form, and the if-then-else form – the else clause is optional: if a then s if b then s1 else s2 This gives rise to an ambiguity in interpretation when there are nested statements, specifically whenever an if-then form appears as s1 in an if-then-else form: if a then if b then s else s2 In this example, s is unambiguously executed when a is true and b is true, but one may interpret s2 as being executed when a is false (thus attaching the else to the first if) or when a is true and b is false (thus attaching the else to the second if). In other words, one may see the previous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greedy Algorithm
A greedy algorithm is any algorithm that follows the problem-solving heuristic of making the locally optimal choice at each stage. In many problems, a greedy strategy does not produce an optimal solution, but a greedy heuristic can yield locally optimal solutions that approximate a globally optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. For example, a greedy strategy for the travelling salesman problem (which is of high computational complexity) is the following heuristic: "At each step of the journey, visit the nearest unvisited city." This heuristic does not intend to find the best solution, but it terminates in a reasonable number of steps; finding an optimal solution to such a complex problem typically requires unreasonably many steps. In mathematical optimization, greedy algorithms optimally solve combinatorial problems having the properties of matroids and give constant-factor approximations to optimization problems with the submodular structure. Specifics Greedy algori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Backtracking
Backtracking is a class of algorithms for finding solutions to some computational problems, notably constraint satisfaction problems, that incrementally builds candidates to the solutions, and abandons a candidate ("backtracks") as soon as it determines that the candidate cannot possibly be completed to a valid solution. The classic textbook example of the use of backtracking is the eight queens puzzle, that asks for all arrangements of eight chess queens on a standard chessboard so that no queen attacks any other. In the common backtracking approach, the partial candidates are arrangements of ''k'' queens in the first ''k'' rows of the board, all in different rows and columns. Any partial solution that contains two mutually attacking queens can be abandoned. Backtracking can be applied only for problems which admit the concept of a "partial candidate solution" and a relatively quick test of whether it can possibly be completed to a valid solution. It is useless, for example ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition. While this apparently defines an infinite number of instances (function values), it is often done in such a way that no infinite loop or infinite chain of references ("crock recursion") can occur. Formal definitions In mathematics and computer science, a class of objects or methods exhibits recursive behavior when it can be defined by two properties: * A simple ''base case'' (or cases) — a terminating scenario that does not use recursion to produce an answer * A ''recursive step'' — a set of rules that reduces all successive cases toward the base case. For example, the following is a recursive definition of a person's ''ancestor''. One's an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function (mathematics)
In mathematics, a function from a set to a set assigns to each element of exactly one element of .; the words map, mapping, transformation, correspondence, and operator are often used synonymously. The set is called the domain of the function and the set is called the codomain of the function.Codomain ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics'Codomain. ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics''/ref> The earliest known approach to the notion of function can be traced back to works of Persian mathematicians Al-Biruni and Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi. Functions were originally the idealization of how a varying quantity depends on another quantity. For example, the position of a planet is a ''function'' of time. Historically, the concept was elaborated with the infinitesimal calculus at the end of the 17th century, and, until the 19th century, the functions that were considered were differentiable (that is, they had a high degree of regularity). The concept of a function was formalized at the end of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parsing
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Latin ''pars'' (''orationis''), meaning part (of speech). The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science. Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as subject and predicate. Within computational linguistics the term is used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer of a sentence or other string of words into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing their syntactic relation to each other, which may also contain semantic and other information (p-values). Some parsing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntactic Predicate
A syntactic predicate specifies the syntactic validity of applying a production in a formal grammar and is analogous to a semantic predicate that specifies the semantic validity of applying a production. It is a simple and effective means of dramatically improving the recognition strength of an LL parser by providing arbitrary lookahead. In their original implementation, syntactic predicates had the form “( α )?” and could only appear on the left edge of a production. The required syntactic condition α could be any valid context-free grammar fragment. More formally, a syntactic predicate is a form of production intersection, used in parser specifications or in formal grammars. In this sense, the term ''predicate'' has the meaning of a mathematical indicator function. If ''p1'' and ''p2,'' are production rules, the language generated by ''both'' ''p1'' ''and'' ''p2'' is their set intersection. As typically defined or implemented, syntactic predicates implicitly order the pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boolean Grammar
Boolean grammars, introduced by , are a class of formal grammars studied in formal language theory. They extend the basic type of grammars, the context-free grammars, with conjunction and negation operations. Besides these explicit operations, Boolean grammars allow implicit disjunction represented by multiple rules for a single nonterminal symbol, which is the only logical connective expressible in context-free grammars. Conjunction and negation can be used, in particular, to specify intersection and complement of languages. An intermediate class of grammars known as conjunctive grammars allows conjunction and disjunction, but not negation. The rules of a Boolean grammar are of the form A \to \alpha_1 \And \ldots \And \alpha_m \And \lnot\beta_1 \And \ldots \And \lnot\beta_n where A is a nonterminal, m+n \ge 1 and \alpha_1, ..., \alpha_m, \beta_1, ..., \beta_n are strings formed of symbols in \Sigma and N. Informally, such a rule asserts that every string w over \Sigma that sat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic Programming
Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, answer set programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of ''clauses'': :H :- B1, …, Bn. and are read declaratively as logical implications: :H if B1 and … and Bn. H is called the ''head'' of the rule and B1, ..., Bn is called the ''body''. Facts are rules that have no body, and are written in the simplified form: :H. In the simplest case in which H, B1, ..., Bn are all atomic formulae, these clauses are called definite clauses or Horn clauses. However, there are many extensions of this simple case, the most important one being the case in which conditions in the body of a clause can also be negations of atomic formulas. Logic programming lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
