# Theories and parsing

October 18, 2015

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to get some reading in while spending time in the beautiful Chania. One of the books I’m reading is Logic as algebra, written by Halmos himself.

One of the examples in the book really stuck out for me — this post is about that example.

A formal language, described informally, is just a set of words that are composed from letters from an alphabet. For example, suppose we have the following alphabet:

$\Sigma = \left\{ D, N, E, A \right\}$

and that our words are built up inductively from $$DED$$, $$NEN$$, and the following rewrite rules:

1. $$D \rightarrow DAN$$
2. $$D \rightarrow NAD$$
3. $$N \rightarrow DAD$$
4. $$N \rightarrow NAN$$

Some examples of words in our language are $$DED$$, $$DANED$$, $$NANADADEN$$, and so on.

When we have a language, we generally want to create a parser for it. A parser has one task: given a word, does it exist in the language or not?

Given a BNF description of the language’s grammar, it’s very easy to create a parser. The BNF for our language is as follows:

<eqn> ::= <d> "e" <d>
| <n> "e" <n>

<d> ::= <d> "a" <n>
| <n> "a" <d>
| "d"

<n> ::= <n> "a" <n>
| <d> "a" <d>
| "n"

Exercise: Remove the left recursion from this grammar and implement a parser for it using a method of your choice.

So far, everything is all fine and dandy. But the syntax of a language has no meaning on its own — there is an additional step of denoting words in our language with an interpretation.

Suppose that we interpret our language as a logical theory. Every word in the language represents a provable theorem. If that were the case, then a parser for this language would effectively be a theorem prover — given a theorem, is it provable in the theory or not?

The language we described above has one such interpretation. It can be thought of as equations over natural numbers involving parity; the addition of two odd numbers is an even number, and so on.

Given that:

• $$D$$ means an odd number
• $$N$$ means an even number
• $$E$$ means equals
• $$A$$ means addition

So when we have the word $$DANED$$, that’s really saying:

$\text{odd} + \text{even} = \text{odd}$

Not many logical theories can be captured so nicely in this way, but it is an interesting & useful way to think about them.