Dain, J.A. (1992) Minimum Distance Error Recovery for LR Parsers. Technical Report. Department of Computer Science, Coventry, UK.

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Abstract

We present a method for recovering from syntax errors encountered during parsing. The method provides a form of minimum distance repair, has linear time complexity, and is completely automatic. It is incorporated into the LR parser-generator yacc in such a way that the compiler writer can generate a parser with recovery without providing any additional information to yacc |Error messages phrased in terms of source input are generated automatically. We present a formal method for evaluating the performance of error recovery methods, based on global minimum-distance error correction, and show that the error recovery method presented achieves a theoretically best performance on 80 percent of Pascal programs in the Ripley-Druseikis collection.

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