R. Clayton (rclayton@clayton.cs.monmouth.edu)
(no date)
The metacharacters '[' and ']' are used to enclose optional material; that is,
material that may or may not appear. For example '[a]' indicates that 'a'
(whatever 'a' may be), may or may not be given.
The metacharacters '...' indicate one or more repetitions of material; that is,
the material may appear one or more times. For example, 'a ...' indicates that
'a' (whatever 'a' may be), may be given one or more times.
Note that metacharacters describe input, they are not part of the input. Any
program - such as your fourth programming assignment - that accepts
metacharacters as valid input would be incorrect (unless the program is a
metacharacter interpreter, such as grep is).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri May 10 2002 - 12:45:04 EDT