Is there a place I can find Backus–Naur Form or BNF grammars for popular languages? Whenever I do a search I don't turn up much, but I figure they must be published somewhere. I'm most interested in seeing one for Objective-C and maybe MySQL.
5 Answers
you have to search on tools used to create grammars: "lex/yacc grammar", "antlr grammar" "railroad diagram"
http://www.antlr3.org/grammar/list.html
Here's some grammar files
objective-c
python
javascript
ruby
There are some links from w:BNF#Language Grammars.
I also found a page that lists grammars for Objective C.

- 10,252
- 6
- 30
- 51

- 94,654
- 45
- 215
- 319
FWIW, the MySQL grammar file (mysql-server/sql/sql_yacc.y
) is open source and browseable at launchpad.net (though it's a bit slow and I got an error when I tried to pull up the specific file).
Also, a snapshot of the whole MySQL Server source is downloadable from dev.mysql.com.

- 538,548
- 86
- 673
- 828
-
2The issue with reusing the grammar that is used by the MySQL server is that is depends on the tokens generated by the lexer. The lexer, having ~115 members, is neither easy to use nor easy to replace. – dvogel Mar 11 '10 at 00:23
IIRC, BNF grammars are just different enough from what yacc/bison want as input to be really annoying :) If you intend to feed these files into a parser generator, you may want to look for files in the appropriate format. I recall seeing such files for Java, JavaScript and C++ at one point. Probably as part of Eclipse, Firefox and GCC, respectively, but I can't remember for sure. I would assume you can find pretty much any parser input file by finding an open source project that uses that language.

- 25,504
- 18
- 62
- 103