A Drop-in Replacement for LR(1) Table-Driven Parsing

Abstract

This paper presents a construction method for a deterministic one-symbol lookahead LR parser which allows non-terminals in the parser look-ahead. This effectively relaxes the requirement of parsing the reverse of the right-most derivation of a string/sentence. This is achieved by replacing the deterministic push down automata of LR parsing by a two-stack automata. The class of grammars accepted by the two-stack parser properly contains the LR(k) grammars. Since the modification to the table-driven LR parsing process is relatively minor and mostly impacts the creation of the goto and action tables, a parser modified to adopt the two-stack process should be comparable in size and performance to LR parsers.