Book recommendations for grammar as it relates to computing?

Question

Though any book on compilers or computation will make some reference to grammar (defining terms such as regular vs. non-regular), it is often in passing. I'm interested in a deeper dive. I believe a lot of the terminology we use comes from Chomsky, but his own books seem to be focused on humans and language learning. I'd like a wide survey of the field, but as it relates to making computers do things or encoding information. Oh, and while I'm being wishful, one written in layman's terms.Is there a "Grammar as it Relates to Computing for Dummies"?

layer8 · Accepted Answer

This might be what you&rsquo;re looking for: https://www.amazon.com/Parsing-Techniques-Practical-Monograp...Not exactly cheap, but pretty good.There&rsquo;s also https://www.amazon.com/Automata-Formal-Languages-Turing-Mach... which focuses more on the Chomsky hierarchy and automata, and doesn&rsquo;t go into practical parsers and the related grammar types like the first book.

harrada256 · Answer

"Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" or "The Dragon Book" as it is informally known was always recommended on compsci courses I have taken. It has a section within "Syntax Analysis" which covers context-free grammars.

open-source-ux · Answer

Does 'Backus&ndash;Naur form' meet your interest? It is a formal way of describing the syntax of a programming language, but I suspect it is not used much for modern programming languages:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form