abstract:Top-Down Parsing Language (TDPL) is a type of analytic formal grammar developed by Alexander Birman in the early 1970s in order to study formally the behavior of a common class of practical top-down parsers that support a limited form of backtracking. Birman originally named his formalism the TMG Schema (TS), after TMG, an early parser generator, but the formalism was later given the name TDPL by Aho and Ullman in their classic anthology The Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling.