[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Why informal specs usually win
Michael.Kay@i... wrote: > > > > > "Since then, almost every author of books on new programming languages > > used [BNF] to specify the syntax rules of the language." > > > The reality, unfortunately, is that almost every author has invented a new > variant of BNF to specify the relevant syntax rules. This is not a big problem because people can pick up the new E-BNFs quite easily. If people implemented software by directly pasting the BNF into a parser generator then that would be a bigger deal. Perhaps in the future we will standardize EBNF and people will generate grammars directly. The problem, of course, is that the EBNF in the standard is not optimized for your parser generator's algorithm (and may not even be compatible with it!). Standardizing EBNF would require a standardization of the underlying algorithms. Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco So what if one dark midnight less than a year from now, millions of computers around the world suddenly grind to a halt? My computer grinds to a halt several times a day. ... [Forget Y2K] We're ignoring a much bigger bug problem that's hiding, well, right under our noses. Call it the Y-Does-My-Computer-Crash-Three-Times-A-Day Problem. - http://www.upside.com/David_Futrelle/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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