Backus-Naur form

Definition

A formal notation for context-free grammars.

Etymology

From the names of computer science pioneers John Backus and Peter Naur. The notation was developed by Backus in 1959 (as Backus normal form) to describe computer languages, specifically ALGOL 58, and expanded and used by Naur in the ALGOL 60 report (the result of a January 1960 meeting). The name change to Backus-Naur form was at the suggestion of Donald Knuth.

Example Sentences

• "While context-free grammars (which, by the way, directly correspond to Backus-Naur forms) define the syntax of declarations, statements, and expressions, etc. (i.e. the structure of a program), the regular grammars define the syntax of identifiers, numbers, strings, etc. (i.e., the basic symbols of the language)."
• "2004, Jason H. Moore, Lance W. Hahn, Systems Biology Modeling in Human Genetics Using Petri Nets and Grammatical Evolution, Kalyanmoy Deb, et. al. (editors), Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO 2004, Proceedings, Part 1, Springer, LNCS 3102, page 396, Here, a Backus-Naur Form (BNF) grammar is specified that allows a computer program or model to be constructed by a simple genetic algorithm operating on an array of bits."
• "The most common syntactic metalanguage adopted in the computing world is Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). There are many slightly different variants of EBNF, but all of them are based on Backus-Naur Form (BNF), developed in the 1960s for describing the syntax of the Fortran and Algol 60 programming languages."