I think I’d be tempted to flag that Wikipedia quote with [citation needed]; the assumptions are, at least, questionable. For example, there are a large number of compiler-construction tools based on yacc which make it extremely easy, in practice, to construct a parser using the more powerful (and equally fast) LALR algorithm, and some also … Read more
Infix notation is easy to read for humans, whereas pre-/postfix notation is easier to parse for a machine. The big advantage in pre-/postfix notation is that there never arise any questions like operator precedence. For example, consider the infix expression 1 # 2 $ 3. Now, we don’t know what those operators mean, so there … Read more
In the context of computer science, a word is the concatenation of symbols. The used symbols are called the alphabet. For example, some words formed out of the alphabet {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} would be 1, 2, 12, 543, 1000, and 002. A language is then a subset of all possible words. For example, we might want to … Read more
LR parsers can’t handle ambiguous grammar rules, by design. (Made the theory easier back in the 1970s when the ideas were being worked out). C and C++ both allow the following statement: x * y ; It has two different parses: It can be the declaration of y, as pointer to type x It can … Read more