On automata and language based grammar metrics

Abstract

Grammar metrics have been introduced to measure the quality and the complexity of the formal grammars. The aim of this paper is to explore the meaning of these notions and to experiment, on several grammars of domain specific languages and of general-purpose languages, existing grammar metrics together with the new metrics that are based on grammar LR automaton and on the language recognized. We discuss the results of this experiment and focus on the comparison between grammars of domain specific languages as well as of general-purpose languages and on the evolution of the metrics between several versions of the same language.