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What can we do about the unnecessary diversity of notation for syntactic definitions?

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Niklaus WirthAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 20, Issue 11

Pages 822 - 823

https://doi.org/10.1145/359863.359883

Published: 01 November 1977 Publication History

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Abstract

The population of programming languages is steadily growing, and there is no end of this growth in sight. Many language definitions appear in journals, many are found in technical reports, and perhaps an even greater number remains confined to proprietory circles. After frequent exposure to these definitions, one cannot fail to notice the lack of “common denominators.” The only widely accepted fact is that the language structure is defined by a syntax. But even notation for syntactic description eludes any commonly agreed standard form, although the underlying ancestor is invariably the Backus-Naur Form of the Algol 60 report. As variations are often only slight, they become annoying for their very lack of an apparent motivation.

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Communications of the ACM Volume 20, Issue 11

Nov. 1977

107 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/359863

Editor:
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 1977

Published in CACM Volume 20, Issue 11

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Derivation of axiomatic definitions of programming languages from algorithmic definitions

Derivation of axiomatic definitions of programming languages from algorithmic definitions

Derivation of axiomatic definitions of programming languages from algorithmic definitions

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