Re: DOCBOOK: Proposal for BNF/EBNF markup

[Dave Makower <davemak at iclick dot com>]

At 4:06 PM -0500 3/19/00, Eve L. Maler wrote:
>This message contains a proposal for BNF/EBNF markup...

At 6:35 AM -0500 3/22/00, Norman Walsh wrote:
>It looks like a good start to me. Other users who have expressed an
>interest in BNF, please speak up now! :-)

Looks pretty impressive to me.

Other than Norman's feedback, which comes from a great deal more 
experience than mine (understatement), I have a couple of comments.

(1) It seems to me that the element names are a little cryptic, 
especially if they're going to find their way into the DocBook 
lexicon, appearing alongside other elements not related to BNF/EBNF. 
One of the things I like about DocBook is that I can usually do a 
quick browse of the element reference and find what I'm looking for 
by a couple of quick intuitive guesses.  (There are exceptions, but I 
guess the intention is to avoid making this one of them.)  What would 
you think about making the element names a little more 
self-explanatory, at the risk of making them too verbose.  For 
example:

prod    --> production
lhs     --> prodleftside
rhs     --> prodtranslation
             (or maybe translation, translations, or translationlist)
nt      --> nonterminal
rhsline --> prodtranslationitem (or maybe translationitem)

(2) I've seen repetition expressed using * and +, and I've also seen 
it expressed using curly brackets.  What would you think if this were 
expressed semantically in the XML with something like either a 
<bnfrepetition> element (which begs the question, how to distinguish 
between * and +), or perhaps a <zeroormore> and a <oneormore> 
element.  (Note:  I'm not thrilled with my element names here; I'm 
more interested in bringing up the idea to encourage feedback.)

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| Dave Makower                                 <davemak@iclick.com> |
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