Invited Talk - Guy Steele
summary
Argument claims that the informal paper notation used by language researchers functions as a real programming language, supported by a 17,000‑page audit of POPL papers showing that over the last 20 years the notation appears in more than half of publications. A toy LaTeX-to-Prolog translator is built and runs the toy LaTeX-to-Prolog compiler to execute a type‑checker example, exposing problems: 34 substitution notations (19 still active), ambiguous overline/ellipsis semantics, and OCR fragility. Proposed fixes include overlines/underlines proposal and a patterned ellipsis formalism.
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chapters (33)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:22Contributors
- 3:44Metanotation
- 5:37Code
- 6:56Type checking
- 8:19ellipses
- 9:18programming language
- 12:04talk structure
- 12:26Gerhart Jensen
- 13:05Modern Rule Notation
- 13:48History of BNF
- 15:45Regular Expressions
- 19:07Be Enough
- 19:59John Backus
- 20:39Peter Nau
- 24:20Syntax Charts
- 25:02Accident of History
- 25:56Other Variants
- 26:53C Style BNF
- 27:53A Style BNF
- 29:26Consistent Substitution Convention
- 30:47Decoration
- 31:56Substitution
- 32:57Capture Free Substitution
- 35:37Notation Problems
- 37:00Three Ways Out
- 37:57Over Lines
- 40:57Vectors
- 44:36Arrowhead
- 50:27Overline Notation
- 56:14Dot Notation
- 58:25Example
- 59:08Conclusions
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