Don’t Use Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF)

One problem with ISO and IEC is that unlike modern organizations they often charge for the IT standards they publish instead of making them freely available (W3C, IETF, and many other organizations do make standards freely available). He argues that one of the most significant problems with reusing grammar knowledge in specifications and manuals is the “diversity of syntactic notations: without loss of generality, we can state that every single language document uses its own notation, which is more often than not, a dialect of the (Extended) Backus-Naur Form.” The paper backs this up with an analysis of “a corpus of 38 programming language standards (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, W3C, etc), 23 grammar containing publications of other kinds (non-endorsed books, scientific papers, manuals) and 8 derivative grammar sources, exhibiting in total 42 syntactic notations while defining 77 grammars (from Algol and C++ to SQL and XPath).”

Source: dwheeler.com