Railroading the Pascal Language

The use of "mantissa"[1] in this document is not right. What's being called mantissa here should be "exponent".

There's some ambiguity about what exactly "mantissa" means in the representation of a floating point number, to the point where some people recommend avoiding it[2] (for example, the IEEE standard for floating point uses "significand" instead).

But whatever mantissa means, it's exactly not (like the page says[1]) what's "used to raise or lower a floating point literal numbers by factors of 10", that's the exponent. The mantissa, if anything, is the other part of the number, that is, what's being multiplied by the factors of 10 (but it's complicated, the wikipedia[2] page explains it).

[1] https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/#float_lit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significand (section "Floating-point mantissa")

Brings me back to a time early in my career where I had to write Cognos QTP, QUIZ, and QUICK programs (blech!) ... their documentation used this format, I didn't know there was a name for it. It was the only nice thing about working with those languages.

I love the design aspect, but it is hard for me to parse so many diagrams. I feel some of them could be expressed more effectively using regular text and maybe tables. (But I am glad they work for people like you!)

Yeah. As a railfan, typing BNF without the "S" in it took some concentration...