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UNIT-II LEXICAL ANALYSIS

2 MARKS
1. What is Lexical Analysis?
The first phase of compiler is Lexical Analysis. This is also known as linear analysis
in which the stream of characters making up the source program is read from
left-to-right and grouped into tokens that are sequences of characters having a
collective meaning.
2. What is a lexeme? Define a regular set.
• A Lexeme is a sequence of characters in the source program that is matched by
the pattern for a token.
• A language denoted by a regular expression is said to be a regular set

3. What is a sentinel? What is its usage?

A Sentinel is a special character that cannot be part of the source program. Normally
weuse ‘eof’ as the sentinel. This is used for speeding-up the lexical analyzer.

4. What is a regular expression? State the rules, which define regular expression?
Regular expression is a method to describe regular language
Rules:
1) ε-is a regular expression that denotes {ε} that is the set containing the empty
string
2) If a is a symbol in ∑,then a is a regular expression that denotes {a}
3) Suppose r and s are regular expressions denoting the languages L(r ) and L(s)
Then,
a) (r )/(s) is a regular expression denoting L(r) U L(s).
b) (r )(s) is a regular expression denoting L(r )L(s)
c) (r )* is a regular expression denoting L(r)*.
d) (r) is a regular expression denoting L(r ).

5. What are the Error-recovery actions in a lexical analyzer?

1. Deleting an extraneous character
2. Inserting a missing character
3. Replacing an incorrect character by a correct character
4. Transposing two adjacent characters

6. Construct Regular expression for the language

L= {w ε{a,b}/w ends in abb}
Ans: {a/b}*abb.

7. What is recognizer?
Recognizers are machines. These are the machines which accept the strings belonging to
certain
language. If the valid strings of such language are accepted by the machine then it is said that
the corresponding language is accepted by that machine, otherwise it is rejected.

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8. Differentiate compiler and interpreter.

Compiler produces a target program whereas an interpreter performs the
operations implied by the source program.

9. Write short notes on buffer pair.

Concerns with efficiency issues
Used with a lookahead on the input
It is a specialized buffering technique used to reduce the overhead required to
process an input character. Buffer is divided into two N-character halves. Use two
pointers. Used at times when the lexical analyzer needs to look ahead several characters
beyond the lexeme for a pattern before a match is announced.
10. Differentiate tokens, patterns, lexeme.

Tokens- Sequence of characters that have a collective meaning.

Patterns- There is a set of strings in the input for which the same token is produced as
output. This set of strings is described by a rule called a pattern associated with the
token
Lexeme- A sequence of characters in the source program that is matched by the
pattern for a token.

11. List the operations on languages.

Union - L U M ={s | s is in L or s is in M}
Concatenation – LM ={st | s is in L and t is in M}
Kleene Closure – L* (zero or more concatenations of L)
Positive Closure – L+ ( one or more concatenations of L)

12. Write a regular expression for an identifier.

An identifier is defined as a letter followed by zero or more letters or digits.The

regular expression for an identifier is given as letter (letter | digit)*

13. Mention the various notational shorthands for representing regular expressions.

One or more instances (+)

Zero or one instance (?)
Character classes ([abc] where a,b,c are alphabet symbols denotes the regular
expressions a | b | c.)
Non regular sets

14. What is the function of a hierarchical analysis?

Hierarchical analysis is one in which the tokens are grouped hierarchically into nested
collections with collective meaning. Also termed as Parsing.

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15. What does a semantic analysis do?

Semantic analysis is one in which certain checks are performed to ensure that
components of a program fit together meaningfully. Mainly performs type checking.

16 MARKS

1)What are roles and tasks of a lexical analyzer?

Main Task: Take a token sequence from the scanner and verify that it is a syntactically correct
program.
Secondary Tasks:
Process declarations and set up symbol table information accordingly, in preparation for
semantic analysis.
Construct a syntax tree in preparation for intermediate code generation.

2. Converting a Regular Expression into a Deterministic Finite Automaton

The task of a scanner generator, such as JLex, is to generate the transition tables or to synthesize
the scanner program given a scanner specification (in the form of a set of REs). So it needs to
convert REs into a single DFA. This is accomplished in two steps: first it converts REs into a
non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) and then it converts the NFA into a DFA.

An NFA is similar to a DFA but it also permits multiple transitions over the same character and
transitions over . In the case of multiple transitions from a state over the same character, when
we are at this state and we read this character, we have more than one choice; the NFA succeeds
if at least one of these choices succeeds. The transition doesn't consume any input characters,
so you may jump to another state for free.

Clearly DFAs are a subset of NFAs. But it turns out that DFAs and NFAs have the same
expressive power. The problem is that when converting a NFA to a DFA we may get an
exponential blowup in the number of states.

We will first learn how to convert a RE into a NFA. This is the easy part. There are only 5 rules,
one for each type of RE:

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As it can been shown inductively, the above rules construct NFAs with only one final state. For
example, the third rule indicates that, to construct the NFA for the RE AB, we construct the
NFAs for A and B, which are represented as two boxes with one start state and one final state for
each box. Then the NFA for AB is constructed by connecting the final state of A to the start state
of B using an empty transition.

For example, the RE (a| b)c is mapped to the following NFA:

The next step is to convert a NFA to a DFA (called subset construction). Suppose that you assign
a number to each NFA state. The DFA states generated by subset construction have sets of
numbers, instead of just one number. For example, a DFA state may have been assigned the set
{5, 6, 8}. This indicates that arriving to the state labeled {5, 6, 8} in the DFA is the same as
arriving to the state 5, the state 6, or the state 8 in the NFA when parsing the same input. (Recall
that a particular input sequence when parsed by a DFA, leads to a unique state, while when
parsed by a NFA it may lead to multiple states.)

First we need to handle transitions that lead to other states for free (without consuming any
input). These are the transitions. We define the closure of a NFA node as the set of all the
nodes reachable by this node using zero, one, or more transitions. For example, The closure of
node 1 in the left figure below

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is the set {1, 2}. The start state of the constructed DFA is labeled by the closure of the NFA start
state. For every DFA state labeled by some set {s1,..., sn} and for every character c in the
language alphabet, you find all the states reachable by s1, s2, ..., or sn using c arrows and you
union together the closures of these nodes. If this set is not the label of any other node in the
DFA constructed so far, you create a new DFA node with this label. For example, node {1, 2} in
the DFA above has an arrow to a {3, 4, 5} for the character a since the NFA node 3 can be
reached by 1 on a and nodes 4 and 5 can be reached by 2. The b arrow for node {1, 2} goes to
the error node which is associated with an empty set of NFA nodes.

The following NFA recognizes (a| b)*(abb | a+b), even though it wasn't constructed with the
above RE-to-NFA rules. It has the following DFA:

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