Explore Lookahead through 10+ example sentences from English, with an explanation of the meaning. Ideal for language learners, writers and word enthusiasts.
Lookahead meaning
- The analysis in advance of subsequent decisions that would be made if a particular branch of an algorithm was followed.
- The analysis of the subsequent characters before the regular expression is matched.
Using Lookahead
- The main meaning on this page is: The analysis in advance of subsequent decisions that would be made if a particular branch of an algorithm was followed. | The analysis of the subsequent characters before the regular expression is matched.
- In the example corpus, lookahead often appears in combinations such as: the lookahead, lookahead symbol, lookahead is.
Context around Lookahead
- Average sentence length in these examples: 25.5 words
- Position in the sentence: 6 start, 8 middle, 6 end
- Sentence types: 20 statements, 0 questions, 0 exclamations
Corpus analysis for Lookahead
- In this selection, "lookahead" usually appears in the middle of the sentence. The average example has 25.5 words, and this corpus slice is mostly made up of statements.
- Around the word, needs, unnecessary, own, symbol, set and sets stand out and add context to how "lookahead" is used.
- Recognizable usage signals include checking additional lookahead symbols beyond and checking the lookahead symbol in. That gives this page its own corpus information beyond isolated example sentences.
- By corpus frequency, "lookahead" sits close to words such as abaribe, abbasids and abstentions, which helps place it inside the broader word index.
Example types with lookahead
The same corpus examples are grouped by length and sentence type, making it easier to see the contexts in which the word appears:
Moreover, in certain cases LL parsing is feasible even with unlimited lookahead. (12 words)
But this minimization is not necessary, and can sometimes create unnecessary lookahead conflicts. (13 words)
The Week 12 lookahead lines are already being bet into at the leading online sportsbooks. (15 words)
For each nonterminal S, the SLR generator works out Follows(S), the set of all the terminal symbols which can immediately follow some occurrence of S. In the parse table, each reduction to S uses Follow(S) as its LR(1) lookahead set. (43 words)
If the lookahead is *, it is in rule 3, so the parser shifts in the * and advances to state 5. If the lookahead is eof, it is at the end of rule 1 and rule 0, so the parser is done. (41 words)
In the parse tree example, the phrase A gets reduced to Value and then to Products in steps 1-3 as soon as lookahead * is seen, rather than waiting any later to organize those parts of the parse tree. (39 words)
Example sentences (20)
If the lookahead is *, it is in rule 3, so the parser shifts in the * and advances to state 5. If the lookahead is eof, it is at the end of rule 1 and rule 0, so the parser is done.
The Week 12 lookahead lines are already being bet into at the leading online sportsbooks.
After opening as high as a 3-point favorite on the lookahead line at select sportsbooks, San Francisco was quickly steamed down to a 1-point favorite following its narrow victory against Detroit in the NFC Championship Game.
The data received from Springfield E&P were lookahead drilling reports for the next day drilling operations.
A grammar that needs lookahead to disambiguate reductions would require a parse table row containing different reduce actions in different columns, and the above procedure is not capable of creating such rows.
But this minimization is not necessary, and can sometimes create unnecessary lookahead conflicts.
Each occurrence of a symbol S in the grammar can be treated independently with its own lookahead set, to help resolve reduction conflicts.
Entries in a table show whether to shift or reduce (and by which grammar rule), for every legal combination of parser state and lookahead symbol.
For each nonterminal S, the SLR generator works out Follows(S), the set of all the terminal symbols which can immediately follow some occurrence of S. In the parse table, each reduction to S uses Follow(S) as its LR(1) lookahead set.
If the lookahead is either of those, the parser shifts them in and advances to state 8 or 9, respectively.
In SLR parsers, these lookahead sets are determined directly from the grammar, without considering the individual states and transitions.
In the parse tree example, the phrase A gets reduced to Value and then to Products in steps 1-3 as soon as lookahead * is seen, rather than waiting any later to organize those parts of the parse tree.
LL(k) grammars can generate more languages the higher the number k of lookahead tokens. citation A corollary of this is that not all context-free languages can be recognized by an LL(k) parser.
Lookahead sets The states and transitions give all the needed information for the parse table's shift actions and goto actions.
LR(k) parsers resolve these conflicts (where possible) by checking additional lookahead symbols beyond the first.
LR parser loop The LR parser begins with a nearly empty parse stack containing just the start state 0, and with the lookahead holding the input stream's first scanned symbol.
Moreover, in certain cases LL parsing is feasible even with unlimited lookahead.
Reductions reorganize the most recently parsed things, immediately to the left of the lookahead symbol.
Some parsers save time and table space by not checking the lookahead symbol in these simple cases.
Syntax error recovery LR parsers can generate somewhat helpful error messages for the first syntax error in a program, by simply enumerating all the terminal symbols that could have appeared next instead of the unexpected bad lookahead symbol.
Common combinations with lookahead
These word pairs occur most frequently in English texts:
- the lookahead 12×
- lookahead symbol 7×
- lookahead is 4×
- lookahead sets 3×
- lookahead to 2×
- lookahead set 2×
- and lookahead 2×
- lookahead symbols 2×