Precedence Automata and Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces Floyd automata, an operational model for Floyd languages, expanding their applicability to infinite strings and enabling model checking, while highlighting their inclusion of visibly pushdown languages and closure properties.

Contribution

It presents Floyd automata as an equivalent formalism for Floyd languages, extending the class to infinite strings and practical applications like model checking.

Findings

Floyd automata are equivalent to Floyd languages.

Floyd languages include visibly pushdown languages.

Extension to infinite strings enables model checking.

Abstract

Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free family (called Floyd languages or FLs). FLs have been shown to strictly include the well-known visibly pushdown languages, and enjoy the same nice closure properties. We introduce here Floyd automata, an equivalent operational formalism for defining FLs. This also permits to extend the class to deal with infinite strings to perform for instance model checking.