For lisp, the BNF is small enough not to worry about that
Well, yeah, lisp barely even *has* syntax.
That's the opposite end of the spectrum.
I can see that you can't wrap up a piece of non-context-free syntax in isolation. However, what I expected was that it might be possible to describe different syntax-elements for each type of contextual variation.
Yes, in principle. Perl can be parsed, obviously,
because perl does parse it, QED. But the question
is, what is required to make that happen? Perl has
both left-associative and right-associative operators,
for instance (although Perl5 is less whole-hog in
this regard than Perl6 will be). Perhaps the larger
issue, though, is that there are various things that
can change the rules for how to parse other things,
and they don't all come right before the thing whose
interpretation they change. Just for one little
example, consider the /x modifier, which changes
the interpretation of whitespace and number signs
that occur in the middle of the regex, before it.
For a Turing-complete parser, this is not a problem,
because you just scan ahead and see what's coming.
I'm not a BNF guru, but if it has a concept of
lookahead, I'm not aware of it.
Another problem is that the way BNF likes to handle
things is to lump cases together and treat them as
the same, but this presents serious problems when
parsing Perl code, especially as regards the various
quoting constructs, *especially* the quoting constructs
related to pattern matching, because of the number
of special cases. In the example above, a typical
BNF approach would be to lump the allowed regular
expression modifiers together (by defining a rule
that can match any of them and then using that rule
at given points in various larger rules), but as
the example above illustrates, you can't do that,
because a regular expression modifier can change the
rules for parsing the regular expression that precedes
it. It also can change the interpretation of what
is parsed; /s and /m do that. BNF is not troubled
by that wrinkle, since it is not concerned as
much with semantics as it is with syntax -- but
that is BNF's whole problem when it comes to Perl,
because the syntax and the semantics are not fully
separable: the parser needs (some) knowledge of the
semantics in order to sort out the syntax.
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."
— Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
