Properties of deterministic top-down grammars

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The class of context-free grammars that can be deterministically parsed in a top down manner with a fixed amount of look-ahead is investigated. These grammars, called LL(k) grammars where k is the amount of look-ahead are defined and a procedure is given for determining if a context-free grammar is LL(k) for a given value of k. A procedure is given for eliminating the ε-rules from an LL(k) grammar at the cost of increasing k by 1. There exist cases in which this increase is inevitable. A procedure is given for obtaining a deterministic push-down machine to recognize a given LL(k) grammar and it is shown that the equivalence problem is decidable for LL(k) grammars. Additional properties are also given.

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