Compilation of optimized syntactic recognizers from Floyd-Evans productions

Abstract

Floyd-Evans productions are becoming increasingly popular as the metalanguage to be used in describing the syntactic analysis phase of programming language processors. Techniques for compiling optimized syntactic recognizers from Floyd-Evans productions are presented. Such recognizers promise to yield significant gains in recognition speed with no increase in storage requirements when compared to table-driven interpretive recognizers. The compiled recognizers can be described in terms of macros that are essentially machine-independent.