🚀 go-pugleaf

> If these people think that parsing PS and writing grammars is a trivial snap:
>
> ...[other quotes deleted]...
>
> then why have we never seen anyone post a BNF for postscript or a
> public domain parser?  I'll bet it's harder than they think.

I think someone just did post a BNF for PostScript, in an earlier article in 
this thread. Basically, the syntax of PostScript is that you have tokens, and
you have procs, which are tokens or procs in curly braces:

	thing ::= token | { thing* }
	PSprogram :== thing*

Not much of a grammar! It doesn't really shed any light on anything, or
help understand the language in any way. Of course, you have to scan the
tokens, 
and that can get a little interesting, what with the "#" notation and all, 
but that's a lexical issue, which is usually considered separately from 
syntax. 

The fact is that as a postfix operator-based language (as opposed to an
infix statment-and-expression-based language), PostScript just doesn't
lend itself
to "parsing".

Ned Batchelder, Digital Equipment Corp., BatchelderN@Hannah.enet.DEC.com