Re: DOCBOOK: Proposal for BNF/EBNF markup

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Dave Makower <davemak@iclick.com> was heard to say:
| 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:

Probably a good idea.

| 
| prod    --> production
| lhs     --> prodleftside
| rhs     --> prodtranslation
|              (or maybe translation, translations, or translationlist)

I think LHS and RHS are fairly universal descriptions of what
occurs in a production, but maybe we should call them
lefthandside and righthandside. Ick. Looks like 'lefth' and
'side' at first glance. Maybe lhs and rhs are better...

| nt      --> nonterminal

Yep.

| rhsline --> prodtranslationitem (or maybe translationitem)

If possible, I'd like to keep this one kind of short. It gets used
a lot in productions.

| (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.)

In the past, we've usually done this with attributes, though I guess
it raises the question of whether or not we need a <terminal> element.

  <production>
    <lhs>work</lhs>
    <rhs>
      <rhsline>[A-Za-z][A-Za-z']*</rhsline>
    </rhs>
  </production>

or

  <production>
    <lhs>work</lhs>
    <rhs>
      <rhsline>
        <terminal>[A-Za-z]</terminal>
        <terminal rep="repeat" choice="opt">[A-Za-z']</terminal>
      </rhsline>
    </rhs>
  </production>

Hmmm. Fairly high markup/text ratio.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Growth for the sake of growth is
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | the ideology of the cancer
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | cell.--Edward Abbey