BNF
by earl, 7750 days ago
Backus-Naur FormA formal notation to describe the syntax of a language (a meta-syntax for syntax-specification). It uses three meta-symbols:
- ::=
- (lhs) is defined as (rhs)
- |
- alternation, or
- < >
- markup non-terminal symbols (rules)
The University of Geneva provides a concise overview of the historical background to BNF as well as common, basic variations.
In 1997 Niklaus Wirth suggested a successor (Wirth, 1977) which is known as EBNF. This version was standardized in 1996 as ISO 14977, the final draft can still be found online.
--
Wirth, N. (1977) What can we do about the unneccessary diversity of notation for syntactic definitions?. Communications of the ACM, 20 (11) p822.
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