Error Reporting, Error Treatment, and Error Correction in Algol Translation — Part 2

Abstract

Part II of this paper deals with treatments of statical errors as mentioned in the introduction of Part I. In recent years several attempts have been made to construct parsers for detecting or correcting syntactical errors automatically [3, 6, 7, 9 ]. We introduce an error correcting algorithm for a part of the ALGOL-60-BNF-Syntax based on techniques for treating regular languages which were developed earlier [3]. Three types of errors are investigated: deletion-(G), mutation-(H) and insertion-(J)-errors. The technique will be demonstrated by choosing two nontrivial examples of the BNF part of the ALGOL-60-syntax, namely the unsigned numbers as a regular event and the arithmetic expressions as a nonregular one.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

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