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LDTA
2010

Faster ambiguity detection by grammar filtering

13 years 3 months ago
Faster ambiguity detection by grammar filtering
Real programming languages are often defined using ambiguous context-free grammars. Some ambiguity is intentional while other ambiguity is accidental. A good grammar development environment should therefore contain a static ambiguity checker to help the grammar engineer. Ambiguity of context-free grammars is an undecidable property. Nevertheless, various imperfect ambiguity checkers exist. Exhaustive methods are accurate, but suffer from nontermination. Termination is guaranteed by approximative methods, at the expense of accuracy. In this paper we combine an approximative method with an exhaustive method. We present an extension to the Noncanonical Unambiguity Test that identifies production rules that do not contribute to the ambiguity of a grammar and show how this information can be used to significantly reduce the search space of exhaustive methods. Our experimental evaluation on a number of real world grammars shows orders of magnitude gains in efficiency in some cases and negli...
H. J. S. Basten, Jurgen J. Vinju
Added 06 Dec 2010
Updated 06 Dec 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where LDTA
Authors H. J. S. Basten, Jurgen J. Vinju
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