The syntax definition formalism SDF—reference manual—

Abstract

SDF is a formalism for the definition of syntax which is comparable to BNF in some respects, but has a wider scope in that it also covers the definition of lexical and abstract syntax. Its design and implementation are tailored towards the language designer who wants to develop new languages as well as implement existing ones in a highly interactive manner. It emphasizes compactness of syntax definitions by offering (a) a standard interface between lexical and context-free syntax; (b) a standard correspondence between context-free and abstract syntax; (c) powerful disambiguation and list constructs; and (d) an efficient incremental implementation which accepts arbitrary context-free syntax definitions. SDF can be combined with a variety of programming and specification languages. In this way these obtain fully general user-definable syntax.