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Positional Grammars: A Formalism for LR-Like Parsing of Visual Languages

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Visual Language Theory

Abstract

Positional grammars naturally extend context-free grammars for string languages to grammars for visual languages by considering new relations in addition to string concatenation. Thanks to this analogy, most results from LR parsing can be extended to positional grammars while preserving its well known efficiency. The positional grammar model is the underlying formalism of the VLCC (Visual Language Compiler-Compiler) system for the automatic generation of visual programming environments. VLCC inherits and extends to the visual field, concepts and techniques of compiler generation tools like YACC. Due to their nature, the positional grammars are a very suitable formalism for processing languages integrating visual and textual constructs.

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Costagliola, G., De Lucia, A., Orefice, S., Tortora, G. (1998). Positional Grammars: A Formalism for LR-Like Parsing of Visual Languages. In: Marriott, K., Meyer, B. (eds) Visual Language Theory. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7240-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-1676-6

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