The paper studies the family of Boolean LL languages, generated by Boolean grammars and usable with the recursive descent parsing. It is demonstrated that over a one-letter alphabet, these languages are always regular, while Boolean LL subsets of Σ*a* obey a certain periodicity property, which, in particular, makes the language anb2n|n0 non-representable. It is also shown that linear conjunctive LL grammars cannot generate any language of the form L·a,b, with L non-regular, and that no languages of the form L·c*, with non-regular L, can be generated by any linear Boolean LL grammars. These results are used to establish a detailed hierarchy and closure properties of these and related families of formal languages.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5132-5155
Number of pages24
JournalTheoretical Computer Science
Volume412
Issue number39
DOIs
StatePublished - 9 Sep 2011

    Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

    Research areas

  • Boolean grammars, Conjunctive grammars, Context-free grammars, Language equations, LL grammars, Parsing, Recursive descent

ID: 41140892