[citation needed] It has been developed at INRIA in France for several decades, mostly by Pierre Boullier, but has become free software since 2007 only.
The deterministic version has been used in operational contexts (e.g., Ada[1]), and is currently used both in the domain of compilation.
[2] The non-deterministic features include an Earley parser generator used for natural language processing.
[3] Parsers generated by SYNTAX include powerful error recovery mechanisms, and allow the execution of semantic actions and attribute evaluation on the abstract tree or on the shared parse forest.
This algorithm has a default behaviour that can be modified by providing a custom set of recovery rules adapted to the language for which the lexer and parser are built.