2 ms·

I'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 ide

by saghm 2y ago

I'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 ago
No, 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.