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From: dowding@bigburd.PRC.Unisys.COM (John Dowding)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: context sensitive parsing
Message-ID: <564@ima.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-May-87 11:24:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: ima.564
Posted: Tue May  5 11:24:24 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 01:25:48 EDT
References: <562@ima.UUCP>
Sender: johnl@ima.UUCP
Organization: Unisys Corporation, Paoli Research Center; Paoli, PA
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Approved: compilers@ima.UUCP

In article <562@ima.UUCP> Kenneth Ng writes:
>Does anyone know any leads to compiler work where the target language
>is context sensitive?  

I think that the use of term context-free and context-sensitive
are misleading here.  Most programming languages have context-sensitive
restrictions, but they are handled in the semantics, not the syntax.
As the semantic actions are generally arbitrarily powerful, they can
certainly do context-sensitive checking.  

An example of this is the constraint in some languages that a function
be defined before it is called.  This can not be checked for by
a context-free grammar.

John Dowding

dowding@bigburd.prc.unisys.com
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