On Wed, 24 May 2000 23:49:29 -0400, you said:
JDB> On 24 May 2000, at 12:56, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
(c) S is a statement of the statement-sequence of the compound-statement of the statement-part of a block containing G."
Wow, 4 "of"s in a row! ;-)
JDB> I am a native speaker of English, but often I cannot make any sense out of JDB> the shortest of sentences in the EP standard. I think it was written by a JDB> committee from Mars. ;-)
A standard specification is not a novel, a nespaper article or even a programmer's manual. Any standard is difficult to read, but standards for programming languages are by far the most complicated ones.
Different specification methods have been attempted by different standardization committees, but none of them is easy to read and to understand. The problem is that you can never leave any ambiguity, never assume that any normal reader will understand without further details. In some standard documents, formal specification methods have been used, and anybody thinking that the Pascal or Extended Pascal standards are difficult should consider the standards for Algol 68, Ada or Modula-2.
The main problem is that Extended Pascal probably lacks a good programmer's manual. In any case, the standard specification should be read only by implementors, not by users.
Olivier Lecarme