Re: Definition of BNF

rdwi@se.bel.alcatel.be (Ronny De Winter) writes:
> The subject says it all, can anyone give me a definition of Backus-Naur Form


I can't supply a formal definition of BNF. (I suspect that


        @inproceedings{prog:backus:59.1,
          author = {J. W. Backus},
          title = {The syntax and semantics of the proposed international
                algebraic language of the {Z{\"u}rich ACM-GAMM} conference},
          booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on
                Information Processing (ICIP)},
          address = {Paris},
          month = jun,
          year = 1959
        }


is really the first paper where BNF was introduced.) But since I
asked the same question not long ago -- in the mean time I finally
tracked down the definition of EBNF:


        @article{prog:wirth:77.1,
          author = {Niklaus Wirth},
          title = {What Can We Do About the Unnecessary Diversity of Notation
                for Syntactic Definitions?},
          journal = cacm,
          volume = 20,
          number = 11,
          month = nov,
          year = 1977,
          pages = {822-823},
        }


Perhaps that's of help to the questioner.


Cheers,
Joachim


--
Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
--

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