Extended Backus-Naur Form

Extended Backus-Naur Form

(language)

Any variation on the basic Backus-Naur Form (BNF) meta-syntax notation with (some of) the following additional constructs: square brackets "[..]" surrounding optional items, suffix "*" for Kleene closure (a sequence of zero or more of an item), suffix "+" for one or more of an item, curly brackets enclosing a list of alternatives, and super/subscripts indicating between n and m occurrences.

All these constructs can be expressed in plain BNF using extra productions and have been added for readability and succinctness.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)