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Concept
Context-free language
Summary
In formal language theory, a context-free language (CFL) is a language generated by a context-free grammar (CFG).
Context-free languages have many applications in programming languages, in particular, most arithmetic expressions are generated by context-free grammars.
Different context-free grammars can generate the same context-free language. Intrinsic properties of the language can be distinguished from extrinsic properties of a particular grammar by comparing multiple grammars that describe the language.
The set of all context-free languages is identical to the set of languages accepted by pushdown automata, which makes these languages amenable to parsing. Further, for a given CFG, there is a direct way to produce a pushdown automaton for the grammar (and thereby the corresponding language), though going the other way (producing a grammar given an automaton) is not as direct.
An example context-free language is , the language of all non-empty even-length strings, the entire first halves of which are a's, and the entire second halves of which are b's. L is generated by the grammar .
This language is not regular.
It is accepted by the pushdown automaton where is defined as follows:
Unambiguous CFLs are a proper subset of all CFLs: there are inherently ambiguous CFLs. An example of an inherently ambiguous CFL is the union of with . This set is context-free, since the union of two context-free languages is always context-free. But there is no way to unambiguously parse strings in the (non-context-free) subset which is the intersection of these two languages.
The language of all properly matched parentheses is generated by the grammar .
Parsing
The context-free nature of the language makes it simple to parse with a pushdown automaton.
Determining an instance of the membership problem; i.e. given a string , determine whether where is the language generated by a given grammar ; is also known as recognition. Context-free recognition for Chomsky normal form grammars was shown by Leslie G.
Official source
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