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Ordered attributed grammars

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Summary

Ordered attributed grammars are defined as a large subclass of semantically well-defined attributed grammars proposed by Knuth. An attributed grammar is ordered if for each symbol a partial order over the associated attributes can be given, such that in any context of the symbol the attributes are evaluable in an order which includes that partial order. The definition does not refer to a predefined strategy for attribute evaluation, e.g. several passes from left to right. For each attributed grammar evaluable by any predefined evaluation strategy such an order exists. The ordering property can be checked by an algorithm, which depends polynomially in time on the size of the input grammar. “Visit-sequences” are computed from the attribute dependencies given by an ordered attributed grammar. They describe the control flow of an algorithm for attribute evaluation which can be part of an automatically generated compiler.

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Kastens, U. Ordered attributed grammars. Acta Informatica 13, 229–256 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00288644

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