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Applying the rules recursively to a source string of symbols will usually terminate in a final output string consisting only of terminal symbols. Consider a grammar defined by two rules. In this grammar, the symbol Б is a terminal symbol and Ψ is both a non-terminal symbol and the start symbol. The production rules for creating strings are as ...
Metalanguages have their own metasyntax each composed of terminal symbols, nonterminal symbols, and metasymbols. A terminal symbol, such as a word or a token, is a stand-alone structure in a language being defined. A nonterminal symbol represents a syntactic category, which defines one or more valid phrasal or sentence structure consisted of an ...
An EBNF consists of terminal symbols and non-terminal production rules which are the restrictions governing how terminal symbols can be combined into a valid sequence. Examples of terminal symbols include alphanumeric characters, punctuation marks, and whitespace characters.
Naur changed two of Backus's symbols to commonly available characters. The ::= symbol was originally a :≡. The | symbol was originally the word "or" (with a bar over it). [9]: 14 BNF is very similar to canonical-form Boolean algebra equations that are, and were at the time, used in logic-circuit design. Backus was a mathematician and the ...
S is called the start symbol. In a left-regular grammar, (also called left-linear grammar), all rules obey the forms A → a; A → Ba; A → ε; The language described by a given grammar is the set of all strings that contain only terminal symbols and can be derived from the start symbol by repeated application of production rules.
A distinguished symbol that is the start symbol, also called the sentence symbol. A grammar is formally defined as the tuple ( N , Σ , P , S ) {\displaystyle (N,\Sigma ,P,S)} . Such a formal grammar is often called a rewriting system or a phrase structure grammar in the literature.
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where A, B, and C are nonterminal symbols, the letter a is a terminal symbol (a symbol that represents a constant value), S is the start symbol, and ε denotes the empty string. Also, neither B nor C may be the start symbol, and the third production rule can only appear if ε is in L(G), the language produced by the context-free grammar G.