From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: Bryce <bovine@cyberscientist.ca>
Cc: bovine@cyberscientist.ca, maurooaranda@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Community improvements to the Emacs Widget Library manual?
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:37:44 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <83v8e9sfp3.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87o7k2ns6y.fsf@cyberscientist.ca> (message from Bryce on Sun, 23 Jul 2023 17:06:45 -0600)
> From: Bryce <bovine@cyberscientist.ca>
> Cc: maurooaranda@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2023 17:06:45 -0600
>
> [...]
>
> To quote the library,
>
> | This is the general syntax of a type specification:
> |
> | NAME ::= (NAME [KEYWORD ARGUMENT]... ARGS)
> | | NAME
> |
> | Where, NAME is a widget name, KEYWORD is the name of a
> | property, ARGUMENT is the value of the property, and ARGS are
> | interpreted in a widget specific way.
>
> When I first approached the manual I had a difficult time understanding
> the full meaning of this meta-language. I did not know what BNF or EBNF
> are, and even after having a friend explain it to me I still struggled
> to realize that NAME on the second bar is an alternative right-hand
> side.
>
> I'm a competent self-taught programmer (and I have a year of formal
> education in CS under my belt), but I wasn't familialr with BNF. I now
> know it is widely used when describing a formal language grammar, but we
> should include something in the manual to at least make it clear that
> this is what follows.
>
> We /might/ elect to include a new manual in Emacs overall, or write a
> new GNU manual to describe the concepts of Backus-Naur forms (BNF), or
> Extended BNF. GNU Bison has a section (§1.1) in its manual which
> describes some of the basic concepts of BNF and context-free grammars.
> We might simply refer uses to that manual, or link to an external
> reference document with a GPL compatible license which could be
> redistributed by the FSF or another party friendly to GNU Emacs.
A cross-reference to another manual where BNF is explained is TRT,
IMO.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-07-24 11:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 35+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-07-09 12:17 Community improvements to the Emacs Widget Library manual? Mauro Aranda
2023-07-09 14:59 ` [External] : " Drew Adams
2023-07-09 23:17 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-12 4:07 ` Bryce
2023-07-12 11:34 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-13 3:30 ` Michael Heerdegen
2023-07-23 23:06 ` Bryce
2023-07-24 11:37 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2023-07-12 11:43 Mauro Aranda
2023-07-12 20:17 ` Bryce
2023-07-14 6:32 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-14 6:52 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-14 6:56 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-14 6:59 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-14 7:07 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-14 14:41 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-14 18:50 ` bovine
2023-07-15 0:08 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-14 10:48 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-08 20:18 Bryce Carson
2023-07-09 5:26 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-07-09 12:02 ` Mauro Aranda
2023-07-09 12:16 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-07-11 0:52 ` Bryce
2023-07-12 12:30 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-07-12 16:42 ` Corwin Brust
2023-07-13 23:05 ` Bryce Carson
2023-07-10 3:38 ` Michael Heerdegen
2023-07-11 23:17 ` Bryce
2023-07-12 5:18 ` Michael Heerdegen
2023-07-12 7:21 ` Bryce
2023-07-13 2:59 ` Michael Heerdegen
2023-07-11 11:04 ` Kjartan Oli Agustsson
2023-07-14 2:02 ` Richard Stallman
2023-07-14 5:28 ` Bryce Carson
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