Daniel van Vugt writes: > I am very surprised you are not accepting corrections to the standard, > for mistakes that you acknowledge do exist. Especially a correction > such as this which only requires changing a single character. Sorry, not a mistake. An ambiguous grammar defines a language just fine. Non-ambiguity is not a requirement. > However, this is not the first time I have encountered an official > language specification with BNF grammar where the authors have stated > they don't guarantee the grammar to be technically accurate... Again, "technically accurate" is not a defined term wrt context-free grammars. I'm not aware of any suggestion that saying a grammar is expressed in BNF implies it is unambiguous. the ambiguities you identified are benign, in that they have no impact on the semantics of the relevant expressions. > For the benefit of the wider community, I think it would be helpful to > still publish the errata, even indefinitely, and even if you have no > intention of ever resolving the problems in the main document. If we ever issue another edition, a Note to the effect that the grammar represented by the BNF is ambiguous should be considered, I agree. ht -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]Received on Friday, 4 November 2011 14:24:41 GMT
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