Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Angle Brackets - Computerphile" video.

  1. I think so, too. The resemblance is more superficial than deep. And BNF is a more powerful notation than DTDs. DTDs are not very useful with XML anyway.
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  2. After many years’ experience, most of us have come to the conclusion that lex/flex and yacc/bison are not really worth using. Yes, you can generate automatic parsers for full LR(k) grammars, but we usually find we can get by just fine with LL(1) grammars, which can be handled quite easily with recursive-descent parsers. And hand-coding parsers and lexers makes them faster anyway.
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  3. 2:23 I think an early draft of ALGOL-68 very nearly violated that tradition by introducing “::=” as a syntactic symbol. Thankfully this was changed later.
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