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In computer science, a Van Wijngaarden grammar is a two-level grammar which provides a technique to define potentially infinite context-free grammars in a finite number of rules. The formalism was invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden to define rigorously some syntactic restrictions which previously had to be formulated in natural language, despite their essentially syntactical content.
Typical applications are the treatment of gender and number in natural language syntax and the well-definedness of identifiers in programming languages. For example, "there is one person" and "there are two people" are both grammatically correct but "there are one person" is incorrect for context-sensitive reasons that a W-grammar could represent.
The technique was used and developed in the definition of the programming language ALGOL 68. It is an example of the larger class of affix grammars.