On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 04:50:02AM -0700, Ian Duncan wrote:
So here's my list of questions so far: 1. What are nonterminals? 2. What are productions and substitutions? [snip]
Sounds to me like you want a book on language design, grammars, parsing, etc. :-) There are many good ones out there, but a quite nice, free, and (as it happens, though it's irrelevant for this question) Haskellish example is "Grammars and Parsing" by Jeuring & Swierstra (PDF, 1.2MB): http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/gont/diktaat.pdf (Ignore the Dutch foreword, the rest is in English). Chapter 2 answers the questions asked above, with copious examples and exercises. Hope this helps, -Andy -- Andy Gimblett Computer Science Department University of Wales Swansea http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/