Automatic Recovery and Correction of Syntactic Errors in Top-Down Compilers

Abstract Context-free grammars which allow a deterministic top-down compilation are studied with respect to automatic error recovery and correction. In particular, k-limited LL(1) grammars are defined, for which no more than k parsing actions are performed after reading an incorrect symbol, k-limited LL(1) grammars are theoretically studied and a simple general algorithm for correcting and recovering from syntactic errors for O-limited LL(1) grammars is described.