Language Chemical Grammar

This is a chemical grammar, the productions corresponding to reactions. The language is the set of all 1-alkanols, 1-alkyImagnesium bromides and 1-bromoalkanes. 

The book concludes with two miscellaneous chapters, Kurt Loening s on chemical nomenclature and Robert Fugmann s on grammar in chemical indexing languages. 

This is an example of a structural grammar. The productions correspond to rules for generating n-alkane structures rather than to chemical reactions. The language specified by this grammar is the set of all n-alkanes. Derivation of n-butane is achieved thusly ... 

We have seen above a simple synthetic grammar wherein the productions are directly derived from chemical reactions and the resulting language of synthesiz-able structures is the set of all molecules that can be synthesized from some specified precursor by application of the reactions. In the simple case of 1-alkanols and 1-bromoalkanes the recognition problem is trivial—we can answer it in a time proportional to the length of the molecule. We are naturally curious as to what is the minimally complex grammar needed to... 

Translation of chemical names into structures can in general be treated as a linguistic issue of a computerized syntactic and semantic analysis of systematic nomenclature as an artificial language. In order to achieve such an analysis, a formal grammar of lUPAC nomenclature must first be derived from the informal rules. This requires the creation of a dictionary of fragments, so-called morphemes, from which the names can be built, and the elucidation of appropriate syntax rules to govern... 

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