A Cobbler's Child
summary
Claims that the informal BNF/Gentzen/substitution notation is actually a widely used programming language, lacks a single specification, and produces real confusion; evidence comes from a hand-reviewed survey of POPL 1973–2016 (1,401 papers, ~17,000 pages) showing inference rules in over half of recent POPL papers and 32–39 substitution notations; tools include visual grep and manual parsing; a toy translator to Prolog (written in Emacs Lisp) compiles a small subset successfully; proposes a formal overline/underline convention and better LaTeX/tooling.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (29)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:18Contributions
- 2:10Data Declarations
- 2:25No Conflict Rules
- 4:13Type Checking
- 5:56Ellipses
- 6:46Rules
- 8:04Survey
- 11:53Structure
- 13:16Labels
- 14:49Grammar
- 17:38Regular Expressions
- 21:37Forms
- 24:33COBOL notation
- 25:47P1 notation
- 26:21Niklaus Beard
- 28:08Syntax Charts
- 29:38Syntax Notation
- 30:40BNF Variants
- 32:22C Style
- 36:17Consistent Substitution Convention
- 38:07Decorated Nonterminal Convention
- 39:12Substitution
- 43:28Problems
- 45:23Solutions
- 46:19Substitution Notation
- 55:33Vectors
- 57:33Unit Replication
- 59:35Nested Overlines
related talks
22mImplement an Esoteric Programming Language for Fun
41mA language in 20 minutes
27mParsing, Compiling, and Static Metaprogramming
31mA brief history of programming languages
26mMake Your Own Programming Language!
01h 02mProgramming Language Research for Technical and Social Good: What PL Can Do for Good?
50mSyntax Matters
58mFun With Parsing