I am completely aware of how to calculate first and follow, my professor has taught me that well , but he had not explained what is the need of First() and Follow(), so any explanation why we need them will help me very much.
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3$\begingroup$ FYI, there's a really good answer to this over on Stack Overflow. $\endgroup$– ggorlenCommented Apr 25, 2020 at 23:40
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2 Answers
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$FIRST$ and $FOLLOW$ sets are used by the algorithm which produces an $LL(k)$ parser from a grammar. They're also used in a number of other algorithms which analyze grammars, but most students will run into them when learning about top-down parsers.
Parsing is a tiny part of the work of producing a compiler, and in practice you can generate a parser using code-generation tools which avoid you having to know much about implementation details. So I'd say that th4e direct answer to your question is that $FIRST$ and $FOLLOW$ sets have very little to do with compiler design, but they are useful in the understanding of how particular parsing algorithms work.
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$FIRST$ of a non-terminal would refer to the very first character of the strings that can be derived starting from that non-terminal. The $FIRST$ of a terminal would be the terminal itself.
The $FOLLOW$ of a non-terminal $A$ refers to the $FIRST$ of the non-terminal or terminal that immediately comes after $A$ in the dervivation rules.
They are used by parsing algorithms to determine which production to use for parsing a string. If we have a choice of multiple productions, and we wish to generate a string $x$ we would like to use the productions that can generate strings that start with $x$. This is where $FIRST$ can be used to identify such productions.
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$\begingroup$ why are they important? what are there importance in compiling? $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 9, 2019 at 18:11
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