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| Related articles |
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| [2 earlier articles] |
| Re: Representations of grammars P.G.Hamer@bnr.co.uk (1993-06-28) |
| Re: Representations of grammars davidm@questor.rational.com (1993-06-28) |
| Representations of grammars tfj@apusapus.demon.co.uk (Trevor Jenkins) (1993-06-28) |
| Re: Representations of grammars carroll@bifur.cis.udel.edu (1993-06-29) |
| Re: Representations of grammars mickunas@mickunas.cs.uiuc.edu (1993-06-29) |
| Re: Representations of grammars macrakis@osf.org (1993-07-01) |
| Re: Representations of grammars nokie@ruacad.ac.runet.edu (1993-07-01) |
| Newsgroups: | comp.compilers |
| From: | nokie@ruacad.ac.runet.edu (Edward G. Okie) |
| Keywords: | parse, EBNF |
| Organization: | Radford University |
| References: | 93-06-063 93-06-076 |
| Date: | Thu, 1 Jul 1993 18:18:39 GMT |
davidm@questor.rational.com (David Moore) writes:
>Was BNF originally considered to be a normal form in the mathematical sense?
A useful reference concerning Backus, Naur, and BNF is
[Backus 1980] "Programming in America in the 1950s",
in "A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century" (Academic Press).
In section 9 of this paper Backus briefly describes his motivation for
developing what came to be called BNF as well as Naur's interest in and
contributions to its development.
"A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century" also contains a paper by
Knuth and Pardo entitled "The Early Development of Programming Languages"
which mentions that Backus's FORTRAN 0 definition contains BNF "in
embryonic form". It also mentions the following as a reference for BNF:
[Knuth 1964] "Backus Normal Form vs. Backus Naur Form", CACM 7, 735-736.
If I correctly remember a description of this reference that I read
somewhere else (I can't remember where), this is a letter in which Knuth
argues for the use of the latter name.
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