However although I do see wire format documentation on Google's site, I don't see an actual BNF grammar anywhere and that makes me nervous. So what? The .prot

However although I do see wire format documentation on Google's site, I don't see an actual BNF grammar anywhere and that makes me nervous. So what? The .proto file may not be a BNF grammar but it tells an application what to expect and presumably the generated code can check for validity. e.g. message Person { required int32 id = 1; required string name = 2; optional string email = 3; } Is that really any different from <Person> ::= <id> <name> | <id> <name> <email> ... ?