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Building Parsers with Java™
book

Building Parsers with Java™

by Steven John Metsker
March 2001
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
8h 35m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Building Parsers with Java™

6.1. The Role of Grammar Transformation

Many simple languages, including most data languages, avoid the subtleties of grammar design by not introducing operators. Operators such as “+” and “-” bring up the question of whether

11 + 5 * 2

should equal 32 or 21. Different languages, notably Smalltalk and Java, have different answers to this question, depending on the precedence of operators. Another question that arithmetic encounters is whether

25 – 16 - 9

equals 0 or 18. Here the answer depends on the associativity of the “-” operator, which determines whether the rightmost or leftmost operator applies first. The grammar for your language determines the associativity and precedence of operators in your language.

In addition to establishing ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0201719622Purchase book