A translation machine with automated top-down parsing

Abstract

The top-down method of parsing programming languages has been widely used in commercially available compilers. Suprisingly, techniques for automating syntax-directed, top-down parsing have not been <u>widely</u> available. This paper describes a practical top-down parsing method which is a part of a general purpose <u>translation machine</u> automaton. The syntactical description capabilities provide for the convenient and efficient specification of linguistic constructs which are difficult or lengthy to specify in BNF metalanguage. The translation machine, which provides for semantic as well as syntactic operations, has been designed for implementation in hardware, microcode, or software. The translation machine can be utilized for convenient and efficient construction of a wide variety of programs that perform source string to object string transformations.