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Lahore Garrison University

CSC373-Compiler Construction
Week-6 Lecture-12
Semester-#5 Fall 2019
Prepared
by:

Eisha Tir Razia

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Overview of previous lecture

 Conversion of DFA into minimized DFA

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Preamble of each lecture

 Tokens, Patterns
 Lexemes
 Identifiers
 Use of Regular Expression in Lexical Analysis

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Lecture Outcomes

 Understanding related to
 Tokens, Patterns, Lexemes, identifiers, Use of Regular Expression in Lexical
Analysis

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How to Describe Tokens?

 Regular Languages are the most popular for

specifying tokens
 Simple and useful theory
 Easy to understand
 Efficient implementations

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Languages

 Let S be a set of characters. S is called the alphabet.

 A language over S is set of strings of characters drawn from S.

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Example of Languages

Alphabet = English characters

Language = English sentences

Alphabet = ASCII
Language = C++ programs,
Java, C#

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Notation

 Languages are sets of strings (finite sequence of characters)

 Need some notation for specifying which sets we want

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Notation

 For lexical analysis we care about regular languages.

 Regular languages can be described using regular expressions.

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Regular Languages

 Each regular expression is a notation for a regular language (a set of

words).
 If A is a regular expression, we write L(A) to refer to language denoted
by A.

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Regular Expression

 A regular expression (RE) is defined inductively

a ordinary character
from S
e the empty string

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Regular Expression

R|S = either R or S
RS = R followed by S
(concatenation)
R* = concatenation of R
zero or more times
(R*= e |R|RR|RRR...)

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RE Extentions

R? = e | R (zero or one R)
R+ = RR* (one or more R)
(R) =R (grouping)

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RE Extentions

[abc] = a|b|c (any of listed)

[a-z] = a|b|....|z (range)
[^ab] = c|d|... (anything but
‘a’‘b’)

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Regular Expression

RE Strings in L(R)
a “a”
ab “ab”
a|b “a” “b”
(ab)* “” “ab” “abab” ...
(a|e)b “ab” “b”

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Example: integers

 integer: a non-empty string

of digits
 digit = ‘0’|’1’|’2’|’3’|’4’|
’5’|’6’|’7’|’8’|’9’
 integer = digit digit*

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Example: identifiers

 identifier:
string or letters or digits starting with a letter
 C identifier:
[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*

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How to Use REs

 We need mechanism to determine if an input string w

belongs to L(R), the language denoted by regular
expression R.

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Finite Automata (FA)

 Specification:
Regular Expressions
 Implementation:
Finite Automata

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Finite Automata

Finite Automaton consists of

 An input alphabet (S)
 A set of states
 A start (initial) state
 A set of transitions
 A set of accepting (final) states

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Finite Automata

 A finite automaton accepts a string if we can follow transitions

labelled with characters in the string from start state to some
accepting state.

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Q&A

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References

 These lecture notes were taken from following source:

 Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools By Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi,
Jeffrey D. Ullman, Contributor Jeffrey D. Ullman, Addison-Wesley Pub.
Co., 2nd edition, 2006

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