<p>Writing a programming language starts with its grammar. But what is a grammar in the context of computation? And how does one go about writing one? This week Marianne talks with computational linguist Jeff Heinz about Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky and what context-free grammar actually means.</p>

Writing a programming language starts with its grammar. But what is a grammar in the context of computation? And how does one go about writing one? This week Marianne talks with computational linguist Jeff Heinz about Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky and what context-free grammar actually means.

Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)

Marianne Bellotti wants to understand how the people who design programming languages do what they do, so she's jumping right in and giving it a shot by writing her own language. Follow along as she struggles to understand parsers, lexers, grammars, gets philosophical about the nature of error handling and gets in way over her head too easily and too often.

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Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)

Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)