Re: context sensitive parsing

dowding@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM (John Dowding)
5 May 87 15:24:24 GMT

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From: dowding@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM (John Dowding)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 5 May 87 15:24:24 GMT
References: <562@ima.UUCP>
Organization: Unisys Corporation, Paoli Research Center; Paoli, PA

In article <562@ima.UUCP> Kenneth Ng writes:
>Does anyone know any leads to compiler work where the target language
>is context sensitive?


I think that the use of term context-free and context-sensitive
are misleading here. Most programming languages have context-sensitive
restrictions, but they are handled in the semantics, not the syntax.
As the semantic actions are generally arbitrarily powerful, they can
certainly do context-sensitive checking.


An example of this is the constraint in some languages that a function
be defined before it is called. This can not be checked for by
a context-free grammar.


John Dowding


dowding@bigburd.prc.unisys.com
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