Extended Backus-naur Form

The Extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF) is any variation on the basic Backus-Naur form (BNF) metasyntax notation with (some of) the following additional constructs:
  • square brackets ".." surrounding optional items,
  • suffix "*" for Kleene closure (a sequence of zero or more of an item), suffix "+" for one or more of an item, curly brackets enclosing a list of alternatives,
  • super/subscripts indicating between n and m occurrences.
When Niklaus Wirth was developing Pascal, he simplified Backus-Naur Form to create EBNF. All these constructs can be expressed in plain BNF using extra productions and have been added for readability and succinctness. There is an International standard (ISO 14977) that defines an EBNF. A draft is freely available from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-ebnf.html. This draft document has some mistakes in it. Throughout the text, as well as in the comments of the examples, `meta-identifiers' are `written as one or more words joined together by hyphens' (as stated in section 4). On the other hand, all examples (except the comments) use spaces to separate several words. The W3C used a different EBNF to specify the XML syntax.

See also

References

External links

 

<< PreviousWord BrowserNext >>
pink triangle
wavefunction collapse
star of india (ship)
euterpe (ship)
euterpe
what is wrong with this picture?
muse
dordrecht
digital sampling
tourism in literature
command.com
speech to the troops at tilbury
dahlia 'dahlstar sunset pink'
domenico maria novara da ferrara
little earthquakes
inflection
star of india
orange (colour)
orange (fruit)
orange sa
lewis chessmen
great leap forward
senecio
ragwort
astrochemistry
mary of guise
england, england
porfirio daz
champs lyses
zyklon b
me and a gun
cocoon
100 year flood
isabella of castile
entrenched river
ferdinand ii of aragon
ron turcotte
lindisfarne gospels
john backus
grenadier
anne of bohemia
ed gein
rock crystal vase
harbin (disambiguation)