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> One of the most common operations in a grammar, by far, is concatenation (aka sequencing). ISO/IEC 14977:1996 requires that a comma be used for every concatenation, so any sequence of N symbols will have N-1 commas.

It seems they were trying really hard to make EBNF NOT look like the grammar it is representing.

> ISO/IEC 14977:1996 represents “one or more” as { symbol }- which means “0 or more symbols, and then subtract the empty set

It's almost as if they were looking for a special syntax to express "1 or more".

Bizarre ... just bizarre.

(4) -> I would say that the lack of regex use is a plus. Yes I use them all the time. For anything complicated I'll just ask ChatGPT to make it. And of course, are regexs all the same across everything?

(5) -> Once you get it you get it.

Every language specification is odd in its own special way. In any case I haven't really seen BNF/EBNF used in the last few years, so this is probably a moot discussion.

The complaints about ISO Prolog, and about ISO standards generally not being available publicly / at no cost, resonate a lot with me. If you compare eg. the POSIX and the ISO C development workflows, and their respective end results, there's a world of difference.

"ISO" (International Standards Organization), where you have "national member bodies", should absolutely be a thing of the past for programming languages (or for anything related to computing). My country's national body's own homepage has a huge tirade, aiming to "dispel myths", such as the "myth" that "standards should be available free of charge". Meanwhile, lots of std orgs have published computing standards with various degrees of openness already.

ISO is a relic when it comes to computing. (So are other standards bodies that choose to remain proprietary; like those behind PCI, SCSI, ... Computing is ubiquitous and these bodies should be forced open by law, for the public interest.)

IMHO ABNF is just as annoying to read, especially its insistence on '/' instead of '|' for alternation (when | has universally become the "OR" symbol in other languages) and "%x" for hex prefixes. My preference for syntax descriptions is [ ] for "optional", ",,," or "+" for "1 or more", "*" for "0 or more", and "{min,max}" or "{n}" for repetition ranges, which closely mirrors regex syntax; I'm not sure if this has been standardised or even has a name, but I've seen it far more often than ABNF/EBNF.

These are some of the many reasons why I developed the Dogma metalanguage.

https://dogma-lang.org/

https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/dogma_v1.0...

That, and also I needed a language that could describe binary data.

> every single language document uses its own notation, which is more often than not, a dialect of the (Extended) Backus-Naur Form

I came across this recently while writing an article that references Lua, Go and Python (3.8) syntax. Each of them uses a slightly different form of EBNF.

To make them more easily comparable, I wanted to convert all three to the same format. Looking for something fairly standard (not entirely ad-hoc but also not as formal as ISO/IEC EBNF or RFC 5234 ABNF), I came across Wirth Syntax Notation [0] [1]:

    syntax = { production } .
    production = identifier "=" expression "." .
    expression = term { "|" term } .
    term = factor { factor } .
    factor = identifier | literal | "(" expression ")" | "[" expression "]" | "{" expression "}" .
    literal = "\"" character {character} "\"" .

It turns out that the Go specification already uses WSN [2]. I converted Lua and Python, and then could work with all three language grammars in a consistent, machine-readable notation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth_syntax_notation

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359863.359883

[2] https://go.dev/ref/spec#Notation

Still use EBNF, so some of my tools, citations, and sources are:

Here is a list of all variants of EBNFs as well as Vim syntax highlighter for EBNF variants:

https://github.com/egberts/vim-syntax-ebnf

And a EBNF format detector:

https://github.com/egberts/filetype-ebnf-grammars

And a master list of all variants of EBNF:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/bnf/ebnf.html