Is there a grammar for PML?

[yamahito]

Hi,

Is there an EBNF or similar grammar for PML?

[pml-lang]

Hello Tomos,

You can find a grammar definition here. Note that this is a draft, not public yet (i.e. not accessible from the menu on PML's website).

PML uses the PDML syntax. The following documents describe basic PDML (without optional extensions like attributes):

• Specification
• Grammar (EBNF-like)
• Railroad Diagrams

[yamahito]

Thanks, Christian.

I am an implementor/committee member for the community group for Invisible XML: https://invisiblexml.org - it looks like it should be fairly easy to make the XML technology stack (xslt, xquery etc) available for PML documents, so it might make an interesting use case (if I ever get my parser working performantly!)

I mean this as an observation, not a criticism, but isn't PML essentially just a different serialization/representation of an XML application?

[pml-lang]

Invisible XML

Very interesting project! The ability to convert any structured data into XML by just providing a grammar is very powerful.

it looks like it should be fairly easy to make the XML technology stack (xslt, xquery etc) available for PML documents

Yes. A customized PML to XML conversion is already implemented in PDML's parser. The outdated article Open-Source Parser For Practical XML (pXML) shows how it works.

I guess the conversion could also be achieved by using Invisible XML. That might indeed be an interesting use case.

isn't PML essentially just a different serialization/representation of an XML application?

Yes, at its most basic level, PDML is 'just another text format' to represent data. The rationale for a new format is explained in chapter PDML vs XML/JSON/YAML.