Passes and Paths of Attributive Grammars

An attribute grammar is pure (left-to-right) multi-pass if a bounded number of left-to-right passes over the derivation tree suffice to compute all its attributes. There is no requirement, as for the usual multi-pass attribute grammars, that all occurrences of the same attribute are computed in the same pass, R is shown that the problem of determining whether an arbitrary attribute grammar is pure multipass, is of inherently exponential time complexity, For fixed k > 0, it can be decided in polynomial time whether an attribute grammar is pure k-pass. The proofs are based on a characterization of pure multi-pass attribute grammars in terms of paths through their dependency graphs. A general result on dependency paths of attribute grammars relates them to (finite-copying) top-down tree transducers. The formal power of k-pass attribute grammars increases with increasing k. Formally, multi-pass attribute grammars are less powerful than arbitrary attribute grammars.