Van Wijngaarden Grammar (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In computer science, a Van Wijngaarden grammar is a two-level grammar which provides a technique to define potentially infinite context-free grammars in a finite number of rules. The formalism was invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden to define rigorously some syntactic restrictions which previously had to be formulated in natural language, despite their essentially syntactical content. Typical applications are the treatment of gender and number in natural language syntax and the well-definedness of identifiers in programming languages. The technique was used and developed in the definition of the programming language ALGOL 68. It is an example of the larger class of affix grammars.