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| | Notations for context-free grammars: BNF, Syntax Diagrams, EBNF |
 | | History: the very first version was created by John Backus, and shortly after improved by Peter Naur, and it was this improved version that was publicly used for the first time, to define Algol 60. |
 | | Knuth's letter (which you may be able to access via ACM) is interesting to read, as it indicates exactly what he thought the importance concepts in BNF were. |
 | | He also points out that BNF is not a "Normal Form", which would imply there were some restrictions on how a grammar could be written down, as in e.g. |
| www.cs.man.ac.uk /~pjj/bnf/bnf.html (1329 words) |
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