Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free family (called Floyd languages or FLs). FLs have been shown to strictly include the well-known visibly pushdown languages, and enjoy the same nice closure properties. We introduce here Floyd automata, an equivalent operational formalism for defining FLs. This also permits to extend the class to deal with infi...

Recent literature extended the analysis of ω-languages from the regular ones to various classes of languages with “visible syntax structure”, such as visibly pushdown languages (VPLs). Operator precedence languages (OPLs), instead, were originally defined to support deterministic parsing and exhibit interesting relations with these classes of languages: OPLs strictly include VPLs, enjoy all rel...

We consider the single machine scheduling problem to minimize the average weighted completion time under precedence constrains. Improving on the various 2-approximation algorithms is considered one of the ten most prominent open problems in scheduling theory. Recently, research has focused on special cases of the problem, mostly by restricting the set of precedence constraints to special classe...

When infix notation is used, parentheses are sometimes omitted according to a precedence relation between the operators as well as a classification of (binary) operators as being left or right associative. We analyze these concepts by first giving a definition of a general precedence system, that declares the superfluous parenthesis pairs for any given expression. We give a characterization of ...