BNF was here
Vadim Zaytsev · 2012
Reusing existing grammar knowledge residing in standards, specifications and manuals for programming languages, faces several challenges. One of the most significant of them is the diversity of syntactic notations: without loss of generality, we can state that every single language document uses its own notation, which is more often than not, a dialect of the (Extended) Backus-Naur Form. In this paper we report on an approach to solve the diversity problem by providing a way to quickly and concisely specify all the parameters of a syntactic notation. The resulting "meta-ebnf" language was used to successfully recover many grammars from sources that use different syntactic notations.