Syntax Definition with SDF3ΒΆ

The definition of a textual (programming) language starts with its syntax. A grammar describes the well-formed sentences of a language. When written in the grammar language of a parser generator, such a grammar does not just provide such a description as documentation, but serves to generate an implementation of a parser that recognizes sentences in the language and constructs a parse tree or abstract syntax tree for each valid text in the language.

Syntax Definition Formalism 3 (SDF3) goes much further than the typical grammar languages. It covers all syntactic concerns of language definitions, including the following features: support for the full class of context-free grammars by means of generalized LR parsing; integration of lexical and context-free syntax through scannerless parsing; safe and complete disambiguation using priority and associativity declarations; an automatic mapping from parse trees to abstract syntax trees through integrated constructor declarations; automatic generation of formatters based on template productions; and syntactic completion proposals in editors.