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SQLite is the place that (to my knowledge) was the first to do these "railroad diagrams". Here are all of theirs (though they're also available inside the documentation): https://sqlite.org/syntaxdiagrams.html



As far as I know, they were originally introduced by Niklaus Wirth to describe Pascal's syntax. See the last pages in this manual from 1973: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....



Definitely not the first, I see that the first release of SQLite was 2000, and I found these railroad diagrams in old Pascal programming books of my father.


For example Turbo Pascal included a Language Guide book that documented the entire Object Pascal language with railroad diagrams:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandturVersion7.0La...


Oracle had those always (even back when only printed manual were available)




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