Backus-Naur form

plural Backus-Naur forms

1. countableuncountablecomputingA formal notation for context-free grammars.First known use 1964.

   3 more examples

   While context-free grammars (which, by the way, directly correspond to Backus-Naur forms) define the syntax of declarations, statements, and expressions, etc. (i.e. the structure of a program), the regular grammars define the syntax of identifiers, numbers, strings, etc. (i.e., the basic symbols of the language).

   1991, Bernd Teufel, Organization of Programming Languages, Springer, page 26

   2004, Jason H. Moore, Lance W. Hahn, Systems Biology Modeling in Human Genetics Using Petri Nets and Grammatical Evolution, Kalyanmoy Deb, et. al. (editors), Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO 2004, Proceedings, Part 1, Springer, LNCS 3102, page 396, Here, a Backus-Naur Form (BNF) grammar is specified that allows a computer program or model to be constructed by a simple genetic algorithm operating on an array of bits.

   The most common syntactic metalanguage adopted in the computing world is Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). There are many slightly different variants of EBNF, but all of them are based on Backus-Naur Form (BNF), developed in the 1960s for describing the syntax of the Fortran and Algol 60 programming languages.

   2011, Airi Salminen, Frank Tompa, Communicating with XML, Springer, page 215

   Synonyms: Backus normal form, BNF