4.3. Limits of Happy Attribute Grammars
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## 4.3. Limits of Happy Attribute Grammars

If you are not careful, you can write an attribute grammar which fails to terminate. This generally happens when semantic rules are written which cause a circular dependency on the value of an attribute. Even if the value of the attribute is well-defined (that is, if a fixpoint calculation over attribute values will eventually converge to a unique solution), this attribute grammar system will not evaluate such grammars.

One practical way to overcome this limitation is to ensure that each attribute is always used in either a top-down (inherited) fashion or in a bottom-up (synthesized) fashion. If the calculations are sufficiently lazy, one can "tie the knot" by synthesizing a value in one attribute, and then assigning that value to another, inherited attribute at some point in the parse tree. This technique can be useful for common tasks like building symbol tables for a syntactic scope and making that table available to sub-nodes of the parse.

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