Adaptive star grammars and their languages

Motivated by applications that require mechanisms for describing the structure of object-oriented programs, adaptive star grammars are introduced, and their fundamental properties are studied. In adaptive star grammars, rules are actually schemata which, via the cloning of so-called multiple nodes, may adapt to potentially infinitely many contexts when they are applied. This mechanism makes adaptive star grammars more powerful than context-free graph grammars. Nevertheless, they turn out to be restricted enough to share some of the basic characteristics of context-free devices. In particular, the underlying substitution operator enjoys associativity and confluence properties quite similar to those of context-free graph grammars, and the membership problem for adaptive star grammars is decidable.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TCS
• Authors: Frank Drewes, Berthold Hoffmann, Dirk Janssens, Mark Minas
• Keywords: Adaptive Star, Context-free Graph Grammars, Grammars, TCS 2010, Theoretical Computer Science