Re: Shell Grammar man page

[Mike Jonkmans]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 11:15:36PM +0100, Ángel wrote:
> On 2021-02-25 at 16:13 +0100, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
> > 
> > Aren't grammars taught already in primary school? It is in the
> > Netherlands.
> > But i agree that it is a good thing to let the text not depend on
> > that.
> 
> I really doubt so. I expect they would teach Dutch¹ grammar, but that's
> quite different than formal grammars such as those of yacc.
> Maybe you might use that in the teaching of a constructed language like
> Esperanto, but I don't think that would be a good approach.

Those grammars weren't all that different from yacc's grammar.
Just simpler and incomplete.

Minimal example:
A Sentence can be "Pronoun Verb." or "Verb Pronoun?"
Pronoun can be "I" or "You" etc.
Verb would be "eat" or "walk".

Sometimes you needed to 'parse' sentences in order to spell them correctly.

> I expect people somewhat familiar with grammar constructs would rather
> come from descriptions of commands or technical documentation if not
> directly from a Linguistic, Mathematics or Computer Engineering
> background.
> Plus, the need to grasp concepts of variables and recursion must not be
> undersestimated.

It is always difficult to estimate the knowledge of your (reading) public.

> An interesting point about primary school is that they probably do
> teach the basic of number bases: 1234 = 1×10000 + 2×1000 + 3×100 + 4×1
> (albeit they wouldn't use 10ⁿ syntax, or actual multiply signs),
> which is exactly what you do with other bases. Yet it's something
> nobody seems to remember when needing octal or hexadecimal years
> later...
> 
> Best regards

> ¹ Or English, French, German… 
That is secondary school stuff (for the Dutch).
As I recall there was less to do with grammar in those foreign languages.

Regards, Mike Jonkmans