Re: Shell Grammar man page

[Ángel]

On 2021-02-25 at 16:13 +0100, Mike Jonkmans wrote:
> > Readers are likely to be familiar with simple commands and
> > pipelines, especially the ones who primarily use interactive
> > shells. I disagree that the average reader is likely to be familiar
> > with grammars.
> 
> 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.

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.


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…