Ah! Many thanks. I had heard of BNF, but don't really have it at the front of my head, like I do XML.
On Sun, 2010-08-22 at 19:56 +0000, john gilmore wrote: > John McKown wrote: > > <begin snippet> > Neither is good "pseudo-xml", if that is what was intended > > <joke type="technical"> > ... > </joke> > > is at least syntactically correct XML. > </end snippet> > > I write XML and the like on occasion, but I was not writing either XML or > pseudo-XML on this occasion. Backus used broken brackets, '<', and '>', as > delimiters in what came to be called BNF, as in > > <decimal digit> ::= 0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9 ^, > > in the 1960s, and I and others find it convenient in many definitional > contexts: it permits a brief descriptive phrase to be used as the manipulable > and largely self-explanatory name of an entity. > > None of this should be interpreted as an effort to delegitimate the use of > broken brackets in XML. I can see no objection to that, but in a period of > radical historical amnesia it is perhaps worth noting that notation thought > by some to have been introduced with XML in fact has a long prior history. > > John Gilmore
