Production Systems: A Notation for Defining Syntax and Translation.

This paper presents the formalism of Production Systems and investigates its application to define the syntax and translation of programming languages. Several properties appear well-suited to this task: 1) the formalism can be used to specify exactly the syntax of a computer language, including context-sensitive requirements; 2) the specification of the context-sensitive requirements on syntax can be isolated from the context-free requirements; 3) the same formalism can be used to specify more general structural properties, including the translation of one language into another. The notation has been developed with readability as a prime design issue. The following examples are given: 1) a specification of the syntax of a small but difficult subset of PL/I; 2) a specification of the rules for translating lambda-calculus expressions into normal form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]