Precedence Automata and Languages

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.Comment: Extended version of the paper which appeared in Proceedings of CSR 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6651, pp. 291-304, 2011. Theorem 1 has been corrected and a complete proof is given in Appendi