[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Hellwig Geisse]

On Mo, 2018-12-03 at 15:20 -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
> Of course one can write a grammar for Fortran using a formal system
> such as BNF.  It's just not going to be a well-behaved context-free
> grammar such as one can do for C or Pascal, and you won't be able to
> feed the grammar to lex and yacc, press a button, and have a compiler
> pop out. 

This in fact also isn't possible for C because of the "typedef problem".
See for example here:

http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2007/11/24/the-context-sensitivity-of-cs-grammar

Hellwig