How to write a grammar:
following the rules of writing grammar is very easy… writing good grammar is terribly difficult
these are the rules of writing a grammar:
* a grammar describes 1 or more rules.
* a rule is defined as: symbol ::= expression
* symbol 'root' *must* be defined, this is the starting point.
* each expression is defined as 1 or more symbols and/or terminal nodes
* a terminal node is contained within single quotes ('') and may not contain spaces
* a terminal node is expressed by a regular expression (regex)
* equal symbols on the left-hand-side (LHS) of a rule are interpreted as boolean OR
example 1:
animal ::= 'horse'
animal ::= 'dog'
animal ::= 'cow'
is read as: animal = 'horse' OR 'dog' OR 'cow'
example 2: (recursion)
animals ::= animal animals
animals ::= animal
is read as: animals = any endless combination of animals OR a single animal
note that the first rule's expression is 'animal animals', if we were writing 'animals animal' we would
go endlessly recursive because the expression is evaluated left-to-right (and since animals equals animals
we would have a problem)
example 3: (regex)
digit ::= '[0-9]' is read as any character '0'..'9'
number ::= '[0-9]+' is read as one or more characters '0'..'9'
this makes it easy to stuff like:
variable ::= '[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*' (a variable starting with a alphanumeric)
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