On Oct 25, 2025, at 13:48, Brian Campbell <[email protected]> wrote: > > Happy ABNF Day[1] to all those who celebrate!
I don’t understand that. ABNF day obviously is November 21, because RFC 733 (the RFC that introduced ABNF) was dated 1977-11-21. (There were lots of RFCs in the 1970s with various variants of BNF, originally mostly like Algol’s BNF, often using left recursion to specify multiple occurrence; the emergence of ABNF can be quite specifically dated to 1977, when “Ken L. Harrenstien, of SRI International” had been “responsible for re-coding the BNF into an augmented BNF which compacts the specification and allows increased comprehensibility” (last para of page v of RFC 733). I still stand in awe to that major achievement; a BNF that was unambiguous and ready for machine-reading, but was realistic enough to still have an escape to English prose that was termed “prose-val” in RFC 2234, 20 years later (RFC 2234 introduced %x and friends, reducing the need for that escape). We now return you to your regular programming. Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ OAuth mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
