3 ms·
> don't seem like they should _technically_ be an issue Sure, people can ignore the EBNF. But if you expect that, then why publish it at all? EBNF is specifica
by viraptor 2y ago
> don't seem like they should _technically_ be an issue
Sure, people can ignore the EBNF. But if you expect that, then why publish it at all? EBNF is specifically used to describe formats and get rid of ambiguities present in text description. Not being careful with it just undermines whole idea.
- saghm 2y agoI'm not saying to ignore the EBNF; I'm saying to ignore the identifiers used in the EBNF. It doesn't matter that ALPHANUMERIC is alphabetic only because the identifier is just used as a shorthand for the tokens it represents. You could literally put anything down instead of ALPHANUMERIC and it would work the same, so the fact that the name isn't a perfectly precise description isn't a big deal.
- zvr 2y agoNo, it's the opposite problem. For example the text talks about "ASCII alphanumerics [09-A-Za-z]", the relevant EBNF rule is called "ALPHANUMERIC", but its definition is only letters. It's not the problem that it's called "ALPHANUMERIC" -- it's that it should describe alphanumerics and it doesn't.