Compilers
I am reading Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman.
Syntax - What the programs look like.
Semantics - What the programs mean.
Context-Free Grammar
if (expression) statement else statement
stmt -> if (expr) stmt else stmt
1. Set of tokens called terminal symbols.
(Examples: digits, signs like < >=, and strings such as while)
2. A set of nonterminals.
(Examples: stmt and expr above)
3. A set of productions where each production consists of a nonterminal, called the left side of the production, an arrow, and a sequence of tokens and/or nonterminals, called the right side of the production.
4. A designation of one of the nonterminals as the start symbol.
Syntax-Directed Translation
Wikipedia says, this refers to a method of compiler implementation where the source language translation is completely driven by the parser.
And that a common method of syntax-directed translation is translating a string into a sequence of actions by attaching one such action to each rule of a grammar.
Thus, parsing a string of the grammar produced a sequence of rule applications. SDT provides a simple way to attach semantics to any such syntax.
C:PTT calls this a grammar oriented technique. The syntax-directed translator is a combination of a syntax analyzer and an intermediate code generator.
Syntax-Directed Definitions
CPTT says this uses a context-free grammar to specify the syntactic structure of the input.
With each grammar symbol, it associates a set of attributes, and with each production, a set of semantic rules for computing values of the attributes associated with the symbols appearing in that production.
Translation: input-output mapping.
The output for x: first construct a parse tree for x. Say there is a node n in the parse tree labeled by the grammar symbol X.
Write X.a to denote the value of attribute a of X at that node.
The value is computed using the semantic rule for attribute a associated with the X-production used at node n.
A parse tree that shows the attribute values at each node is called an annotated parse tree.
Synthesized Attributes