I'm looking to expand my knowledge and would love to hear your thoughts on metasyntax languages that are essential for developers. I already know about four of them: BNF, EBNF, ABNF, and WNF. Are there any others that could really help in programming or syntax definition that I should add to my list?
2 Answers
I've honestly never really heard the term 'metasyntax' in practice. It might be just semantics, but in my decade of working in the field, it doesn't come up much. So, I’d say it’s not that critical unless you’re defining the syntax for a language or doing some specialized work. There are plenty of cases where you're probably using these concepts without even calling them out as metasyntax.
Honestly, in 15 years of professional software development, I can say I’ve never needed those metasyntax tools. Not even when I created my own language for fun. They’re super niche and probably not worth stressing over unless you're diving deep into language design.
It definitely came up in my theoretical computer science studies! It's a way to define language syntax. If you check out the Wikipedia on BNF, it might look familiar. You probably encounter it when dealing with string parsing or language specifications, like in the Python docs! But yeah, most of us don’t use it on the daily.