productionset — A set of EBNF productions
productionset ::=
A productionset
is a collection of Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) production
s.
EBNF is a notation for describing the grammar of context-free languages. Even if you aren't conversant in the programming language concepts of context-free languages and grammars, it's not really as hard to understand as it sounds.
Formatted as a displayed block. The detailed processing expecations with respect to individual productions, left-hand sides, and right-hand sides are quite complex.
The production
s should be numbered.
These elements contain productionset
: acknowledgements
, annotation
, answer
, appendix
, article
, bibliodiv
, bibliography
, bibliolist
, blockquote
, callout
, calloutlist
,
caption
(db.caption), caution
, chapter
, colophon
, constraintdef
, cover
, dedication
, entry
, example
, figure
, footnote
, glossary
, glossdef
,
glossdiv
, glosslist
, html:fieldset
, html:form
, important
, index
, indexdiv
, informalexample
, informalfigure
, itemizedlist
, legalnotice
, listitem
, msgexplan
, msgtext
, note
, orderedlist
, para
, partintro
, preface
, procedure
, qandadiv
, qandaset
, question
, refsect1
, refsect2
, refsect3
, refsection
, refsynopsisdiv
, revdescription
, sect1
, sect2
, sect3
, sect4
, sect5
, section
, setindex
, sidebar
, simplesect
, step
, taskprerequisites
, taskrelated
, tasksummary
, td
, textobject
, th
, tip
, toc
, tocdiv
, variablelist
, warning
.
The following elements occur in productionset: info
(db.titleforbidden.info), info
(db.titleonly.info), production
, productionrecap
, title
, titleabbrev
.
A set of EBNF productions describes the legal arrangements of tokens in a language. Consider arithmetic expressions as a simple example.
The expression “3 + 4
” is valid and so is “3 + 4 - 5
”, but “3 - + - 4
” is not, nor is “3 + 4 6
”. We can use EBNF to describe all the possible legal arrangements:
Arithemetic Expressions | ||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
That is expressed in DocBook like this:
<article xmlns='http://docbook.org/ns/docbook'> <title>Example productionset</title> <simplesect><title>EBNF Grammar</title> <productionset><title>Arithemetic Expressions</title> <production xml:id="ebnf.expression"> <lhs>Expression</lhs> <rhs><nonterminal def="#ebnf.arith">ArithExpression</nonterminal> | <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> <lineannotation>Does this grammar actually get precedence right? </lineannotation> </rhs> </production> <production xml:id="ebnf.arith"> <lhs>ArithExpression</lhs> <rhs><nonterminal def="#ebnf.expression">Expression</nonterminal> '+' <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> | <nonterminal def="#ebnf.expression">Expression</nonterminal> '-' <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> </rhs> </production> <production xml:id="ebnf.mult"> <lhs>MultExpression</lhs> <rhs><nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> '*' <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> | <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> '/' <nonterminal def="#ebnf.mult">MultExpression</nonterminal> | <nonterminal def="#ebnf.number">Number</nonterminal> </rhs> <constraint linkend="div0"/> </production> <production xml:id="ebnf.number"> <lhs>Number</lhs> <rhs>[0-9]+</rhs> </production> </productionset> <constraintdef xml:id="div0"> <title>Division by Zero</title> <para>Division by zero is an error.</para> </constraintdef> </simplesect> </article>