# Symbols¶

The building block of SDF3 productions is a symbol. SDF3 symbols can be compared to terminals and non-terminals in other grammar formalisms. The elementary symbols are character classes, literals, and sorts.

Intrinsically, only character classes are real terminal symbols. All other symbols represent non-terminals. SDF3 also support symbols that capture BNF-like notation such as lists, optionals, alternatives, and sequences. Note that these symbols are also non-terminals, and are just shorthands for common structures present in context-free grammars.

## Character classes¶

Character classes occur only in lexical syntax and are enclosed by [ and ]. A character class consists of a list of zero or more characters (which stand for themselves) such as [x] to represent the character x, or character ranges, as an abbreviation for all the characters in the range such as [0-9] representing 0, 1, ..., 9. A valid range consists of [c1-c2], where the character c2 has a higher ASCII code than c1. Note that nested character classes can also be concatenated within the same character class symbol, for example [c1c2-c3c4-c5] includes the characters c1 and the ranges c2-c3, c4-c5. In this case, the nested character classes do not need to be ordered, as SDF3 orders them when performing a normalization step.

### Escaping¶

SDF3 uses a backslash (\) as a escape for the quotingof special characters. One should use \c whenever c is not a digit or a letter in a character class.

### Unicode¶

Arbitrary Unicode code points can be included in a character class by writing an escaped integer, which is particularly useful for representing characters outside the printable ASCII range. The integer can be a binary, octal, decimal, or hexadecimal number, for example: \0b101010, \052, \42, and \0x2A all represent the code point 42, or the '*' character.

### Special ASCII Characters¶

Additionally, special ASCII characters are represented by:

• \t : horizontal tabulation
• \n : newline character
• \v : vertical tabulation
• \f : form feed
• \r : carriage return

### Operators¶

SDF3 provides the following operators for character classes:

• (complement) ~ : Accepts all the characters that are not in the original class.
• (difference) / : Accepts all the characters in the first class unless they are in a second class.
• (union) \/ : Accepts all the characters in either character classes.
• (intersection) /\ : Accepts all the characters that are accepted by both character classes.

Note that the first operator is unary and the other ones are left associative binary operators. Furthermore, such operators are not applicable to other symbols in general.

## Literals¶

A literal symbol defines a fixed length word. This usually corresponds to a terminal symbol in ordinary context-free grammars, for example "true" or "+". Literals must always be quoted and consist of (possibly escaped) ASCII characters.

As literals are also regular non-terminals, SDF3 automatically generates productions for them in terms of terminal symbols.

"definition" = [d][e][f][i][n][i][t][i][o][n]


Note that the production above defines a case-sensitive implementation of the defined literal. Case-insensitive literals are defined using single-quoted strings as in 'true' or 'else'. SDF3 generates a different production for case-insensitive literals as

'definition' = [dD][eE][fF][iI][nN][iI][tT][iI][oO][nN]


The literal above accepts case-insensitive inputs such as definition, DEFINITION, DeFiNiTiOn or defINITION.

## Sorts¶

A sort corresponds to a plain non-terminal, e.g. Statement or Exp. Sort names start with a capital letter and may be followed by letters, digits, hyphens, or underscores. Note that unlike SDF2, SDF3 does not support parameterized sorts (yet!).

Sorts are declared by listing their name in the appropriate sorts section, which have the following forms.

For context-free sorts:

context-free sorts

$Sort*  For lexical sorts: lexical sorts$Sort*


SDF3 also supports kernel sorts:

sorts

\$Sort*


Note

Kernel sorts should be suffixed with -CF or -LEX, depending on whether they are context-free sorts or lexical sorts. When a sort in a sorts block does not have a suffix, it is treated as a context-free sort.

Writing a sort in these sections only indicates that a sort has been declared, even if it does not have any explicit production visible.

## Optionals¶

SDF3 provides a shorthand for describing zero or exactly one occurrence of a sort by appending the sort with ?.

For example, the sort Extends? can be parsed as Extends or without consuming any input. Internally, SDF3 generates the following productions after normalizing the grammar::

Extends?.None =
Extends?.Some = Extends


Note that using ? adds the constructors None and Some to the final abstract syntax tree.

## Lists¶

Lists symbols as the name says, indicate that a symbol should occur several times. In this way, it is also possible to construct flat structures to represent them. SDF3 provides support for two types of lists, with and without separators. Furthermore, it is also possible to indicate whether a list can be empty (*) or should have at least one element (+). For example, a list Statement* indicates zero or more Statement, whereas a list with separator {ID ","}+ indicates one or more ID separated by ,. Note that SDF3 only supports literal symbols as separators.

Again, SDF3 generates the following productions to represent lists, when normalizing the grammar:

Statement* =
Statement* = Statement+
Statement+ = Statement+ Statement
Statement+ = Statement

{ID ","}* =
{ID ","}* = {ID ","}+
{ID ","}+ = {ID ","}+ "," {ID ","}
{ID ","}+ = {ID ","}


When parsing a context-free list, SDF3 produces a flattened list as an AST node such as [Statement, ..., Statement] or [ID, ..., ID]. Note that because the separator is a literal, it does not appear in the AST.

## Alternative¶

Alternative symbols express the choice between two symbols, for example, ID | INT. That is, the symbol ID | INT can be parsed as either ID or INT. For that reason, SDF3 normalizes alternatives by generating the following productions:

ID | INT = ID
ID | INT = INT


Note that SDF3 only allow alternative symbols to occur in lexical syntax. Furthermore, note that the alternative operator is right associative and binds stronger than any operator. That is, ID "," | ID ";" expresses ID ("," | ID) ";". To express (ID ",") | (ID ";"), we can use a sequence symbol.

## Sequence¶

A sequence operator allows grouping of two or more symbols. Sequences are useful when combined with other symbols such, lists or optionals, for example ("e" [0-9]+)?. Like alternative symbols, sequences can only occur in lexical syntax. A sequence symbol is normalized as:

("e" [0-9]+) = "e" [0-9]+


## Labeled symbols¶

SDF3 supports decorating symbols with labels, such as myList:{elem:Stmt ";"}*. The labels can be used for layout constraints/declarations or by other tools that use SDF3 grammars as input.

## LAYOUT¶

The LAYOUT symbol is a reserved sort name. It is used to indicate the whitespace that can appear in between context-free symbols. The user must define the symbol LAYOUT such as:

LAYOUT = [\ \t\n]


Note that the production above should be defined in the lexical syntax.

Last update: 2023-02-02
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