Timeline for how to formally arrive at a correct EBNF grammar of a language
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 24, 2020 at 21:50 | vote | accept | anekix | ||
| May 24, 2020 at 21:22 | answer | added | rici | timeline score: 3 | |
| May 24, 2020 at 20:35 | history | edited | anekix | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 86 characters in body
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| May 24, 2020 at 20:26 | comment | added | anekix | @rici i have modified the original question to include the rules of this mini language . i hope its clear now. | |
| May 24, 2020 at 20:24 | history | edited | anekix | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added language specification
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| May 24, 2020 at 20:14 | comment | added | anekix | @rici first of all thank you very much for taking the time and explaining, i should have made explicit in the question about the rules of my language, but your last lines "if you want to parse the language in order to reveal the syntactic structure of a valid text, then your grammar should reflect the syntactic structuring you have in mind, and not all of them do" clears most of my doubt i had. | |
| May 24, 2020 at 20:08 | comment | added | rici | But to answer your concrete question: Yes, any language has an unlimited number of possible grammars. It is not, in general, possible to verify whether two different grammars derive the same language. If you just want to recognise whether a sentence is in a language, it doesn't matter which of the grammars for that language you use, but if you want to parse the language in order to reveal the syntactic structure of a valid text, then your grammar should reflect the syntactic structuring you have in mind, and not all of them do. | |
| May 24, 2020 at 20:04 | comment | added | rici | You don't have a language specification before you write the EBNF. All you have is a few examples. A few examples is not a specification. So your question is trying to nail jelly to the wall. If you had a formal specification, you might be able to mechanically convert it to a different formal specification (such as the subset of EBNF which is formally complete). Or you might not; it would depend on the nature of the specifications. But there's no formal mechanism which can produce a formal specification from a language whose vague contours you sketch in the air. | |
| May 24, 2020 at 14:57 | history | asked | anekix | CC BY-SA 4.0 |