Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
436119 Science of Computer Programming 2006 17 Pages PDF
Abstract

We describe the behaviour of three variants of GLR parsing: (i) Farshi’s original correction to Tomita’s non-general algorithm; (ii) the Right Nulled GLR algorithm which provides a more efficient generalisation of Tomita and (iii) the Binary Right Nulled GLR algorithm, on three types of LR table. We present a guide to the parse-time behaviour of these algorithms which illustrates the inefficiencies in conventional Farshi-style GLR parsing. We also describe the tool GTB (Grammar Tool Box) which provides a platform for comparative studies of parsing algorithms; and use GTB to exercise the three GLR algorithms running with LR(0), SLR(1) and LR(1) tables for ANSI-C, ISO-Pascal and IBM VS-COBOL. We give results showing the size of the structures constructed by these parsers and the amount of searching required during the parse, which abstracts their runtime.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computational Theory and Mathematics