This chapter introduces the basic syntactic ingredients of all Maude specifications: identifiers, module names, sort names, and operator declarations. Other syntactic parts of Maude specifications, like equations and rules, will appear in the following chapters.
Some syntax is presented in an informal way by means of general schemes; a formal BNF grammar of the language can be found in Chapter A.16.
The chapter finishes explaining some features that can be used to reduce parsing ambiguities in the user-definable syntax, including mixfix operator declarations, supported by Maude.
In Maude, identifiers are the basic syntactic elements, used to name modules and sorts, and to form operator names. For example, NAT, Nat, and hello-world are identifiers. In general, an identifier in Maude is any finite sequence of ASCII characters such that:
It does not contain any white space. For example, the sequence ‘abc def
’ is not one identifier, but two.
The characters ‘{
’, ‘}
’, ‘(
’, ‘)
’, ‘[’, ‘]’ and ‘,
’ are special, in that they break a sequence of characters into several identifiers. For example, the sequence ab{c,d}ef
counts as seven identifiers, namely, ab, {
, c, ,
, d, }
, and ef.
The backquote character ‘‘’ is used as an escape character to indicate that a blank space or the special characters do not break the sequence. Consequently, backquotes can only appear immediately before any of the special characters, or between two non-empty strings of characters—with neither the ending of the first string nor the beginning of the second string being another backquote—for exactly these purposes. For example, 1‘ab‘{c‘,d‘}ef
is a single identifier. Maude’s pretty printer will display such an identifier in the form 1 ab{c,d}ef
.
Nonprinting characters in strings use C backslash conventions [77, Section A2.5.2].
In Maude the basic units of specification and programming are called modules.1 A module consists of syntax declarations, providing appropriate language to describe the system at hand, and of statements, asserting the properties of such a system. The syntax declaration part is called a signature and consists of declarations for:
sorts, giving names for the types of data,
subsorts, organizing the data types in a hierarchy,
kinds, that are implicit and intuitively correspond to “error supertypes” that, in addition to normal data, can contain “error expressions,” and
operators, providing names for the operations that will act upon the data and allowing us to build expressions (or terms) referring to such data.
We use symbols , etc. to denote signatures.
In Maude there are two kinds of modules: functional modules and system modules. Signatures are common for both of them. The difference between functional and system modules resides in the statements they can have:
functional modules admit equations, identifying data, and memberships, stating typing information for some data, while
system modules also admit rules, describing transitions between states, in addition to equations and memberships.
We use , etc. to denote sets of equations and memberships, and , etc. to denote sets of rules.
From a programming point of view, a functional module is an equational-style functional program with user-definable syntax in which a number of sorts, their elements, and functions on those sorts are defined. From a specification viewpoint, a functional module is an equational theory with initial algebra semantics. Functional modules are described in detail in Chapter 4, here we just discuss some of their top-level syntax. Each functional module has a name, which is a Maude identifier. Any Maude identifier can be used, but the preferred style for module names is an all capitalized identifier, and in the case of a compound name the different parts are linked with hyphens. For example, a module defining numbers and operations on them can be called NUMBERS. The top-level syntax will then be
with ‘’ corresponding to all the declarations of submodule importations, sorts, subsorts, operators, variables, equations, and so on.
From a programming point of view, a system module is a declarative-style concurrent program with user-definable syntax. From a specification viewpoint, it is a rewrite theory (where specifies the frozen arguments of operators in ; see Section 4.4.9) with initial model semantics. Again, each system module has a name, which is a Maude identifier. And as for functional modules, the preferred style is an all capitalized name, with consecutive parts linked with hyphens in the case of compound names. For example, a module specifying the behavior of a vending machine may be called VENDING-MACHINE. It will then be introduced with the following top-level syntax:
where again ‘’ corresponds to all the declarations of submodule importations, sorts, subsorts, operators, variables, equations, rules, and so on. System modules are described in detail in Chapter 5.
In the rest of the chapter we will describe the ingredients of signatures, that is, the syntactic elements common to both functional and system modules, such as sorts, subsorts, kinds, operators, variables, and the terms that can be built on a signature, postponing the discussion about the syntax specific to functional and system modules to Chapters 4 and 5, respectively.
The first thing a specification needs to declare are the types (that in the algebraic specification community are usually called sorts) of the data being defined and the corresponding operations. Sorts can be partially ordered via a subsort relation.
A sort is declared using the sort keyword followed by an identifier (the sort name), followed by white space and a period, as follows:
and multiple sorts may be declared using the sorts keyword, as follows:The period at the end of the sort declaration, as for the other types of declarations, is crucial. Note that if either the period is missing or no space is left before and after the period, there can be parsing problems or unintended behavior. For example, the following declaration is syntactically correct but causes an unintended interpretation because of a missing ‘.’, since this way sorts A, B, sort, and C are declared.
Note also that the keywords sort and sorts are synonyms. One may use sort for multiple sort declarations and sorts for single ones, although we do not encourage this style.
For example, we can declare sorts Zero, NzNat, and Nat in the NUMBERS module, either one at a time
or all at onceThe identifiers <
, ->
, and ~>
cannot be used as sort names. Moreover, identifiers used for sorts cannot contain any of the characters ‘:
’, ‘.
’, ‘[
’, or ‘]
’. The reasons for these restrictions will become clear below in this section and in Sections 3.4, 3.5, and 17.2.1. The use of ‘{
’, ‘}
’, and ‘,
’ is only allowed in structured sort names (see below). Although any so restricted identifier is a legal sort name, the preferred style is to capitalize the first letter of the name. Furthermore, in the case of a compound name, such as a sort of nonzero naturals, the names (each with the first letter capitalized) or suitable abbreviations will be juxtaposed without spaces or hyphens, like, for example, NzNat.
A sort name can also be structured. Structured sort names are used in parameterized modules; for example, we may use List{X}
for a parameterized list sort with parameter X and List{Nat}
for its instantiation to lists of natural numbers (see Section 7.4.3). A structured sort name contains at least one pair of curly brace symbols ‘{
’ and ‘}
’, and is constructed according to the following BNF grammar, without any white space between terminals:
Notice that structured sorts are allowed to contain ‘{
’, ‘,
’ and ‘}
’ but only in accordance with the above grammar. Thus all the following are structured sort names:
while the following are not legal sort names:
{X} |
(lacks sort identifier prefix) |
a(X, Y) |
(‘, ’ not inside braces) |
a{b, {d}}{e} |
({d} lacks sort identifier prefix) |
a({) |
(‘{ ’ without closing ‘} ’) |
Structured sort names can be written in an equivalent single-identifier form by using backquotes. For example, the sort a{b, c{d}}{e}
may be written as a‘{b‘,c‘{d‘}‘}‘{e‘}
. Hybrid notation such as in a{b‘,c}
is not allowed. When backquotes are omitted, the sort name becomes a sequence of tokens according to Maude’s usual tokenization rules and arbitrary white space may be inserted between tokens. For example, Foo‘{X‘,Y‘}
, Foo{X,Y}
, and Foo{X, Y}
are three equivalent forms for the same structured sort name.
Structured sort names must be written in their equivalent single-identifier form inside operator hooks (see Chapter 8) or in metasyntax (see Chapter 17).
Apart from their special syntax and their use as parameterized sorts in parameterized modules (see Section 7.4.3), structured sort names behave just like sort identifiers.
The subsort relation on sorts parallels the subset relation on the sets of elements in the intended model of these sorts. Subsort inclusions are declared using the keyword subsort. The declaration
states that the first sort is a subsort of the second. For example, the declarationsspecify that the sorts Zero (containing only the constant 0) and NzNat (the nonzero natural numbers) are subsorts of Nat, the natural numbers. More than one subsort relationship can be declared using the keyword subsorts, as follows:
Then, the above declarations can be given in a single declaration as follows:If we extend NUMBERS with sorts Int and NzInt we can express the additional subsort relationships compactly by
A set of subsort declarations must define a partial order among the set of sorts. For this to be true, the user is required to avoid cycles in the subsort declarations. For example, if a sort A is declared as a subsort of B, and B is declared as a subsort of A, we would have a cycle.
Note that the partial order of subsort inclusions partitions the set of sorts into connected components, that is, into sets of sorts that are directly or indirectly related in the subsort ordering. For example, all the above sorts Zero, Nat, NzNat, NzInt, and Int belong to the same connected component in the subsort ordering, whereas a sort Bool would clearly belong to a different connected component and could have other sorts, for example a supersort Prop of propositions, related to it in the same component. Intuitively, connected components gather together related sorts of data such as numerical data, truth-value data, and so on. Graphically, we can visualize the partial order of subsort inclusions as an acyclic graph (the corresponding Hasse diagram), and then the connected components are exactly those of the underlying graph, as in the following example:
In a Maude module, an operator is declared with the keyword op followed by its name, followed by a colon, followed by the list of sorts for its arguments (called the operator’s arity or domain sorts), followed by ->, followed by the sort of its result (called the operator’s coarity or range sort), optionally followed by an attribute declaration (the discussion of operator attributes is postponed to Section 4.4), followed by white space and a period. Thus the general scheme has the form
Here are some operator declarations for our NUMBERS module.
If the argument list is empty, the operator is called a constant. Thus zero is a constant.
The name of the operator is a string of characters that may consist of several identifiers, due to the presence of blanks or other special characters. Underscores (_) play a special role in these strings. If no underscore character occurs in the operator string—as in the case of the operator sd above—then the operator is declared in prefix form. If underscore characters occur in the string, then their number must coincide with the number of sorts declared as arguments of the operator (in particular, constant names cannot include any underscore character). The operator is then in mixfix form, with the -th underscore indicating the place where arguments of the -th sort must be placed in expressions formed with that operator. In the above example the operators s_, _+_, and _*_ are in mixfix form.
There may or may not be any other characters before or after any of the underbars. If no other characters appear, we say that the operator has been declared with empty syntax. For example, we could declare a sort NatSeq of sequences of natural numbers formed with empty syntax as follows:
where assoc is an attribute declaring that sequence concatenation is associative (see Section 4.4.1). With this operator declaration we can write number sequences such asOperators having the same arity and coarity can be declared simultaneously by using the keyword ops and giving the non-empty list of their corresponding names after the ops keyword and before the :, as is done for the declarations of _+_ and _*_ in the example above.
An operator can also be declared using several identifiers. This can be due to the presence of special characters, or to blank spaces, or both. Consider for example the operator declaration
that may allow a natural language style in the syntax of a programming language. It uses eight identifiers in the Maude sense, but declares a single binary operator, with the underscores indicating the place of the arguments in the mixfix notation. Internally, Maude also associates to this operator a corresponding single-identifier form by using backquotes. We could have equivalently defined the operator using the single-identifier form, namely,Of course, both variants are equivalent and have the same mixfix display, but the version without backquotes is obviously more convenient.2
The declaration of an operator requires an extra pair of parentheses if we already use parentheses as part of the syntax of the operator. Suppose we had in a programming language a binary operator (_ only after _)
. Then, we have to declare it as follows:
Since an operator may be declared using several identifiers, in an ops declaration involving several operators each operator declaration can be enclosed in parentheses if necessary, to indicate where the syntax of each operator begins and ends. We could have declared both operators together, as follows:
Thus, one or several Maude identifiers can be used in operator declarations. Regarding style, the preferred one, particularly for single-identifier operators with prefix syntax, is to use lower case names. However, for a composed name such as a meta parse operator, the subsequent names will be juxtaposed and will typically begin with a capital letter to enhance readability, e.g., metaParse.
Constants may be given the pconst attribute to mark them as parameter constants (see Section 7.4.1). Like sorts, they can also be given structured names in parameterized modules (see Section 7.4.3).
The equational logic underlying Maude is membership equational logic [95, 14]. In this logic sorts are grouped into equivalence classes called kinds. For this purpose, two sorts are grouped together in the same equivalence class if and only if they belong to the same connected component. Maude sorts are user-defined, while kinds are implicitly associated with connected components of sorts and are considered as “error supersorts.” Terms (see Section 3.8) that have a kind but not a sort are understood as undefined or error terms.
In Maude modules, kinds are not independently and explicitly named. Instead, a kind is identified with its equivalence class of sorts and can be named by enclosing the name of one or more of these sorts in square brackets [...]
; when using more than one sort, they are separated by commas.
For example, suppose we add a partial predecessor function to our NUMBERS module,
Then Maude will parse the term p(zero) and assign it the kind [Nat], or equivalently [NatSeq] or also [Nat, NatSeq], since the sorts Nat and NatSeq belong to the same connected component. Although any sort, or list of sorts in the connected component, can be enclosed in brackets to denote the corresponding kind, Maude uses a canonical representation for kinds; specifically, Maude prints the kind using a comma-separated list of the maximal elements of the connected component.
The Maude system also lifts automatically to kinds all the operators involving sorts of the corresponding connected components to form error expressions. Such error expressions allow us to give expressions to be evaluated the benefit of the doubt: if, when they are simplified, they have a legal sort, then they are okay; otherwise, the fully simplified error expression is returned, which the user can interpret as an error message. Equational simplification can also occur at the kind level, so that operators can map error terms to defined terms, which may be useful for error recovery.
It is also possible to explicitly declare operators at the kind level. This corresponds to declaring a partial operation, which is defined for those argument values for which Maude can determine that the resulting term has a sort. Note that the operation is considered to be total at the kind level. As an example, consider the following fragment of a graph specification:
sorts Node Edge . ops source target : Edge -> Node . sort Path . subsort Edge < Path . op _;_ : [Path] [Path] -> [Path] .
The sorts Node and Edge, along with the source and target operators mapping edges to nodes, axiomatize the basic graph concepts. The sort Path is intended to be the paths through the graph, sequences of edges with the target of one edge being the source of the next edge. Edges are singleton paths, and _;_
denotes the partial concatenation operation, indicated by giving kinds rather than sorts in the argument list. Later, in Section 4.3, we will see how to specify when a sequence of edges has sort Path.
To emphasize the fact that an operator defined at the kind level in general defines only a partial function at the sort level, Maude also supports a notational variant in which an (always total) operator at the kind level can equivalently be defined as a partial operator between sorts in the corresponding kinds, with syntax ‘~>
’ instead of ‘->
’ to indicate partiality. For example, the above operator declaration can be equivalently specified by
More generally, the partial operator declaration
is equivalent to the total operator declaration at the kind level
Operators in Maude can be overloaded, that is, we can have several operator declarations for the same operator with different arities and coarities. Consider extending our number module with a new sort Nat3 (of natural numbers modulo 3), constants 0, 1, and 2 of sort Nat3, and two further operator declarations for _+_
.
Now _+_
is overloaded, having three declarations. However, there are two different kinds of overloading present in the example. The additional declaration of _+_
with first argument NzNat is an example of subsort overloading. Here the two _+_
operators on Nat and NzNat are supposed to have the same behavior on their shared argument values, that is, the operator on the subsort NzNat is the restriction of the operator on the larger sort Nat. The main point of such declarations is to give more sort information, for example that the result of adding a nonzero natural number to any natural number is nonzero. Many more examples of this form of overloading can be found in the predefined data modules for the number hierarchy (Chapter 8) and in other modules throughout the manual.
In contrast, the sorts Nat and NzNat on the one hand, and the sort Nat3 on the other belong to two different connected components in the subsort ordering and therefore natural number addition and addition modulo 3 are semantically unrelated. This form of overloading is called ad-hoc overloading. Both subsort and ad-hoc overloading of operators are allowed in Maude. However, to avoid ambiguous expressions we require that if the sorts in the arities of two operators with the same syntactic form are pairwise in the same connected components, then the sorts in the coarities must likewise be in the same connected component.
Strictly speaking, this requirement would rule out ad-hoc overloaded constants. For this reason, we have declared two different constants zero and 0 for the corresponding zero elements. However, this requirement can be relaxed, and it is often natural to do so. For example, the constants of a parameterized module (see Chapter 7.4) can appear in many different connected components for different instances of the module, and it may be cumbersome to rename them all. To allow this relaxation, constants—and, more generally, terms (see Section 3.8)—can be qualified by their sort, by enclosing them in parentheses followed by a dot and the sort name. In this way, we could have instead declared 0 as an ad-hoc overloaded constant for natural numbers and for natural numbers modulo 3, and could then disambiguate the expression 0 + 0 by writing, for example, 0 + (0).Nat and 0 + (0).Nat3, or (0 + 0).Nat and (0 + 0).Nat3.
A variable is constrained to range over a particular sort or kind. Variables can be declared on-the-fly in Maude with syntax consisting of an identifier (the variable name), a colon, and another identifier (its sort) or kind expression (its kind). For example, N:Nat declares a variable named N of sort Nat, and X:[Nat] declares a variable named X of kind [Nat].
The scope of an on-the-fly variable declaration is the declaration’s occurrence. Thus each such variable must be accompanied by its sort or kind.
A variable can also be declared in a module using the keyword var followed by an identifier (the variable name), followed by a colon with white space before and after, followed by an identifier (its sort) or kind expression (its kind), followed by white space and a period.
The scope of such a declaration is the entire module. It has the effect of replacing occurrences of N and X by the on-the-fly versions N:Nat and X:[Nat].
Multiple variables of the same sort can be declared using the keyword vars.
Both upper and lower case names for variables are possible. However, upper case variable names are more customary in Maude. The syntactic conventions for the acceptable names of variables in variable declarations are the same as those for constant operators, that is, for operators with empty arity. In particular, the underscore ‘_’ cannot be used in the name of a variable, but the colon ‘:’ can; thus the scanning for ‘:’ in order to extract the appropriate sort or kind from an on-the-fly variable declaration is done from right to left.
A term is either a constant, a variable, or the application of an operator to a list of argument terms. The sort of a constant or variable is its declared sort. In the application of an operator, the argument list must agree with the declared arity of the operator. That is, it must be of the same length, and each term must have sort (or at least kind) in the connected component of the corresponding declared argument sort. Using prefix form—which can always be used for any operator, regardless of having been declared with either prefix or mixfix syntax—the syntax of operator application is the operator’s name followed by ‘(’, followed by a list of argument terms separated by commas, followed by ‘)’. Here are some examples of prefix notation from our numbers module.
The application of an operator declared with mixfix form also has a mixfix syntax: the operator’s mixfix name with each underscore replaced by the corresponding term from the argument list. The mixfix form of the above examples is
The kind of a term is the result kind of its topmost operator. For example, the kind of p(s zero) is [Nat], since Nat is the result sort of p. If a module’s grammar is unambiguous (see the discussion on parsing in the following section), then each term has a single kind. But we can also associate sorts to terms. In general, even if the grammar is unambiguous, a term may have several sorts, due to the subsort ordering. Specifically, constants have the sort they are declared with and any supersort of it. Given a term of the form , if has sort for and there is an operator declaration , then the term has sort and any of its supersorts. For example, in our example NUMBERS module the term s s 0 has sorts NzNat and Nat.
A very desirable property of a module is that each term has a least sort that can be assigned to it. Such a least sort gives us the most detailed information on how to classify such a term as a data element. For example, the least sort of the term s s 0 is NzNat, and this gives us the most precise classification of such a term in the sort hierarchy. Given an arbitrary signature , we can have terms that fail to have a least sort. However, if satisfies a simple syntactic property called preregularity [68], we can guarantee that any -term will have a least sort. We call preregular if for each , given an -argument function symbol and sorts such that is a well-formed -term, then there is a least sort among all the sorts appearing in (possibly overloaded) operator declarations of the form in such that for we have . For example, the signature
fails to be preregular, because for the sort A the term f(X:A) is a well-formed term, but there is no least sort for the result of f with arguments greater or equal to A, since either B or C can be chosen as result sorts, and they are incomparable in the sort hierarchy. As a consequence, both f(X:A) and f(a) do not have a least sort: they have sorts B, C, and D, and B and C are minimal sorts among those sorts.
As already mentioned in Section 3.4 for the assoc attribute and further explained in Section 4.4.1, operators can be declared with equational axioms such as associativity (assoc), commutativity (comm), and identity (id:). This means that, if we denote by the corresponding associativity and/or commutativity, and/or identity equations, we are not really interested in syntactic terms , but rather in equivalence classes modulo , that is, in the equivalence class of each term , since all representatives of the class are viewed as equivalent representations. Preregularity modulo now means that we can assign a least sort not just to any well-formed term , but also to its equivalence class . As further explained in Section 20.3.5, Maude assumes that modules are preregular modulo whatever axioms such as assoc, comm, and id: have been declared for operators, checks syntactic conditions ensuring preregularity modulo , and generates warnings when a module fails to satisfy such preregularity conditions.
A ground term is a term containing no variables: only constants and operators. Intuitively, ground terms denote either data in case no equations apply to the term (for example, s zero is data) or functional expressions indicating how an equationally defined function is applied to data (for example, (s zero) + (s zero)
). Ground terms modulo equations constitute the initial algebra associated with a specification, as discussed later in Section 4.3.
As seen in previous sections, the Maude language supports user-definable syntax including mixfix operator declarations. Parsing is done in stages. First Maude’s surface syntax is parsed using a bison/flex-based parser. Operator declarations are extracted and are used to construct a grammar for language constructs that can contain terms. Finally those constructs are parsed using a version of Leo’s algorithm for context-free grammars [80], which has been extended to handle Maude-specific features including the precedence-gather mechanism and bubbles.
With mixfix syntax, the occurrence of ambiguities in the parsing of terms is very common. Of course, we can always provide unambiguous grammars, which are frequently surprisingly large, or use parentheses for breaking the possible ambiguities. But usually we would like to have a more powerful alternative. Maude reduces such ambiguities by using a mechanism based on precedence values and gathering patterns.
Let us assume the following declarations for some arithmetic expressions:
An expression like 1 + 2 * 3
is ambiguous, since both (1 + 2) * 3
and 1 + (2 * 3)
are valid parses. This kind of ambiguity is usually solved by assigning a precedence to each of the operators. In Maude, the precedence of an operator is given by a natural number,3 where a lower value indicates a tighter binding.
Operator precedence then defines how an expression should be parsed when several operators are present. We can assign a precedence to an operator with a precedence (abbreviated prec) attribute, which takes the precedence value as an argument. For example, one would expect multiplication to be evaluated before addition. Thus, we can give precedences, e.g., and to the operators _+_
and _*_
, respectively, as follows:
The term 1 + 2 * 3
is now unambiguous: its only possible parse is 1 + (2 * 3)
.
Precedence can be overridden using parentheses; we can always write (1 + 2) * 3
in case this is the term we are interested in. For those operators for which the user does not specify a precedence value, a default one is given (see Section 3.9.1 for a discussion on the default precedence values). For example, both operators _+_
and _*_
above get as their default precedence, and hence the ambiguity.
The precedence mechanism is not enough, however. For example, the expression 1 + 2 + 3
is still ambiguous, because both parses (1 + 2) + 3
and 1 + (2 + 3)
are possible. Usually, programming languages define a way of associating operators to solve this kind of problems, so that the associativity of the operators determines which is evaluated first. For example, addition usually is left-associative, and therefore we expect to parse it as (1 + 2) + 3
. In Maude, we can specify not only the associativity of operators, but general gathering patterns for each operator.
The gathering pattern of an operator restricts the precedences of terms that are allowed as arguments. We give a (non-empty) sequence of as many E, e, or & values as the number of arguments in the operator, that is, one of these values for each argument position:
E indicates that the argument must have a precedence value lower or equal than the precedence value of the operator,
e indicates that the argument must have a precedence value strictly lower than the precedence value of the operator, and
& indicates that the operator allows any precedence value for the corresponding argument.
In fact, the precedence values work because of their combination with the gathering patterns. For example, the precedence values given to _+_
and _*_
work as expected because their default gathering pattern is (E E)
(see Section 3.9.2), which forces them to be applied only to terms of smaller or equal precedence value. Thus, 1 + (2 * 3)
is a valid parse for 1 + 2 * 3
. On the other hand, since the precedence of a term is given by the precedence of its top operator, (1 + 2) * 3
is not a valid parse for 1 + 2 * 3
, because the term 1 + 2
has precedence value 33, which is greater than the precedence of _*_
.
Moreover, by default, all constants have precedence (see Section 3.9.1), and therefore they are also valid arguments for both operators.
We can specify _+_
and _*_
as left-associative by giving to them gathering pattern (E e)
.
In this way, we force the second argument of these operators to be of a strictly lower precedence. Then, a term with _+_
as top operator (or any other operator with the same precedence) like 2 + 3
is nonvalid as second argument for _+_
. But it would be valid as first argument, since terms with equal precedence are allowed. Now the only possible parse for the expression 1 + 2 + 3
is (1 + 2) + 3
.
Note that parentheses could be described as an operator (_)
with precedence and gathering pattern (&)
. Thus, any term can appear inside parentheses, and any subterm of a term can be enclosed in parentheses.
Maude associates default precedence values to those operators for which the user does not specify this information as part of the operator declaration. The default precedence values are entirely similar to those used by OBJ3 [69]. The rules for the assignment of default precedence values are:
Operators with standard form (constants and prefix operators) always have precedence 0, regardless of user settings. The user cannot change the precedence value or gathering pattern for operators in standard form.
Mixfix operators which begin and end with something different from an underbar have precedence . Operators as, for example, (_)
, <_:_|_>
, and if_then_else_fi
follow this rule.
Mixfix operators which begin or end with an underbar have precedence for a unary operator and 41 for everything else. Note that this ‘or’ is exclusive. Operators like, e.g., not_
, _!
, or to_:_
fall into this category.
Mixfix operators which begin and end with an underbar have precedence . This rule applies, e.g., to the operators __
, _+_
, _*_
, and _?_:_
.
As for precedence values, Maude assigns default gathering patterns to all those operators for which the user does not specify this information as part of the operator declaration. The default gathering patterns are also entirely similar to those used by OBJ3 [69]. The rules for the assignment of the default gathering patterns are:
All arguments of prefix operators have a gathering value &
, regardless of the user specification.
If the underbar corresponding to an argument is not adjacent to another underbar, and it is neither the leftmost nor the rightmost token in the operator, then the default gathering value for such an argument is &
. In other words, if an underbar appears between tokens different from the underbar, then its corresponding argument will have this default gathering pattern. For example, the default gathering pattern for the operator if_then_else_fi
is (& & &)
, the default gathering pattern for the operator [_and then_]
is (& &)
, and the default gathering pattern for the operator (_)
is (&)
.
If the underbar corresponding to an argument is adjacent to another underbar, or if it is the leftmost or the rightmost token in the operator, then the default gathering value for such an argument is E
. Thus, e.g., the default gathering pattern for the operator not_
is (E)
, the default gathering pattern for the operator _?_:_
is (E & E)
, the default gathering pattern for the operator _+_
is (E E)
, and the default gathering pattern for the operator __
is (E E)
.
Those binary operators which start with an underscore, end with an underscore, and have a precedence greater than 0 are handled as special cases:
The operator will have gathering pattern (e E) if it has the assoc attribute (see Section 4.4.1). For example, the following operators fall into this category.
If the operator does not have the assoc attribute, but its first argument, its last argument, and its coarity are in the same connected component of sorts, then:
Assuming Int < IntList
, then the operators
have, by default, gathering patterns (e E)
and (E e)
, respectively. According to the general rule, since their argument bars are the leftmost and the rightmost tokens, the gathering pattern should be (E E)
for both of them. However, both operators fall into the second special case, since they are binary operators which start and end with underscores, have a precedence greater than 0 (by default 41), and are not declared associative. Given the subsort relation, the operator _<:_
may right-associate, but not left-associate, that is, 1 <: 2 <: 3
should be parsed as 1 <: (2 <: 3)
, but (1 <: 2) <: 3
should not be a valid parse. Therefore, _<:_
gets default gathering pattern (e E)
. And similarly for _:>_
, although in this case it can left-associate, and therefore it gets default gathering pattern (E e)
.
In addition to the signature defined by the user, parsing of terms takes place in an extended grammar in which information for handling parentheses, sort and equality predicates, if_then_else_fi
, and qualification operators are included. These structures belong to the so-called extended signature of a module. The main structures added in the extended signature of a module are:
Sort disambiguation. For each sort S in the signature of a module, Maude adds to the signature the operator
This helps in the disambiguation of ad-hoc overloaded constants and terms. As an example, remember from Section 3.6 that if we declare 0 as an ad-hoc overloaded constant for natural numbers and for natural numbers modulo 3, then we can disambiguate the expression 0 + 0 by writing, for example, 0 + (0).Nat and 0 + (0).Nat3, or (0 + 0).Nat and (0 + 0).Nat3. As another example, in the module META-MODULE (see Section 17.4), the term none is ambiguous, since the operator none is used as the empty set of operator declarations, equations, rules, etc. We can disambiguate it by writing (none).OpDeclSet
. Of course, these disambiguation operators can be used not only for constants, but for any term. For example, we can write (2 + 3).Nat
as a valid term in the predefined module NAT.
Parentheses. The extended signature of a module contains the operator
for each sort S in its signature. These operators allow the use of parentheses without having to declare a parentheses operator for each sort. For example,(2 + 3)
, (2 + 3) + 5
, (2 + (3) + 5)
, (((2 + 3)) + 5)
, are all valid terms in NAT, thanks to these declarations.Equivalent single-identifier form for all operators. Each declared operator, including those in mixfix form, may also be used in their equivalent single-identifier prefix form. For example, in the NAT module, the term _+_(2, 3)
is equivalent to 2 + 3
, and the terms if true then 2 + 3 else - 3 fi
and if_then_else_fi(true, _+_(2, 3), -_(3))
are equivalent; any combination is possible so if_then_else_fi(true, 2 + 3, - 3)
is also valid.
Flattened associative argument lists. Operators with the attribute assoc may be used in Maude in a nonparenthesized flattened form (see Section 4.8). This is possible thanks to the precedence-gathering values in mixfix notation, but it is also possible in prefix syntax. For example, gcd(2, 3, 4)
is a valid term in NAT, where gcd is the greater common divisor operator, which is declared as a binary associative operator. Of course, this term can always be written in the standard format as gcd(2, gcd(3, 4))
or gcd(gcd(2, 3), 4)
. Furthermore, we can combine this possibility with the single-identifier form to write things like _+_(2, 3, 4)
instead of _+_(_+_(2, 3), 4)
or _+_(2, _+_(3, 4))
, but of course, since _+_
is declared with the assoc attribute in the predefined module NAT, we can just write 2 + 3 + 4
.
Polymorphic operators and the BOOL module. All the information contained in the predefined modules TRUTH-VALUE, TRUTH, BOOL-OPS, and BOOL is included in the extended signature of each module (unless this inclusion is explicitly disabled). In particular, appropriate instances of the polymorphic operators contained in TRUTH (that is, if_then_else_fi
, _==_
, and _=/=_
) are generated for each sort in the module; in addition, for each sort S, a sort predicate _:: S
is also added. All these modules and operators are fully explained in Section 8.1.
Maude provides the parse command for parsing terms. The command does not do anything other than parsing the given term in the extended signature of the module. This is exactly what is done when a term appears in a command, before executing such a command. For example, when we try to reduce a term (2 + 3) * 5
, the system first parses it and then reduces it. If the term is ambiguous, or there is no parse for it, an error message is given and no further action takes place.
Maude> reduce in NAT : 2 + true . Warning: <standard input>, line 1: didn’t expect token true: 2 + true <---*HERE* Warning: <standard input>, line 1: no parse for term.
For testing the parsing of terms we can use the parse command.
Maude> parse in NAT : 2 + true . Warning: <standard input>, line 1: didn’t expect token true: 2 + true <---*HERE* Warning: <standard input>, line 1: no parse for term.
As other commands, parsing can take place either in the module explicitly mentioned in the command or in the current module.
We illustrate the use of the parse command for the examples introduced in the previous sections. Let us first consider a module PARSING-EX1 with constants 1, 2, and 3, and binary operators _+_
and _*_
.
fmod PARSING-EX1 is sort Nat . ops 1 2 3 : -> Nat . ops _+_ _*_ : Nat Nat -> Nat . endfm
Since _+_
and _*_
are declared without precedence values, and therefore both get the default value 41, we obtain the following result.
Maude> parse 1 + 2 * 3 . Warning: <standard input>, line 13: ambiguous term, two parses are: 1 + (2 * 3) -versus- (1 + 2) * 3 Arbitrarily taking the first as correct. Nat: 1 + (2 * 3)
As a first solution, we may consider using parentheses.
Let us now consider the module PARSING-EX2, where _+_
and _*_
are declared with precedences 33 and 31, respectively.
fmod PARSING-EX2 is sort Nat . ops 1 2 3 : -> Nat . op _+_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 33] . op _*_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 31] . endfm
Now, parentheses are not necessary for parsing the term 1 + 2 * 3
.
Of course, we may still use parentheses.
Since the default gathering patterns for binary operators like _+_
and _*_
is (E E)
, a term like 1 + 2 + 3
is ambiguous.
Maude> parse in PARSING-EX2 : 1 + 2 + 3 . Warning: <standard input>, line 30: ambiguous term, two parses are: 1 + (2 + 3) -versus- (1 + 2) + 3 Arbitrarily taking the first as correct. Nat: 1 + (2 + 3)
As above, we may use parentheses to parse such terms.
Let us now consider the module PARSING-EX3, where _+_
and _*_
are declared to be left-associative, that is, with gathering patterns (E e)
.
fmod PARSING-EX3 is sort Nat . ops 1 2 3 : -> Nat . op _+_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 33 gather (E e)] . op _*_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 31 gather (E e)] . endfm
Now, the terms above have unambiguous parses.
Let us now consider the module PARSING-EX4, where _+_
and _*_
are declared to be associative. Note that in this case, by default, they are assigned gathering patterns (E e)
.
fmod PARSING-EX4 is sort Nat . ops 1 2 3 : -> Nat . op _+_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 33 assoc] . op _*_ : Nat Nat -> Nat [prec 31 assoc] . endfm
We illustrate the use of the extended signature in which all terms are parsed with the following examples.
Maude> parse in PARSING-EX4 : if 1 == 2 then 1 + 2 else _+_(1, 2) fi . Nat: if 1 == 2 then 1 + 2 else 1 + 2 fi