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Fun fact: A list with leading markers is simpler to parse than a comma separated one.

If the marker is "-", EBNF might look like this:

  leading-marker-list = *("-", element)

Comma separated would look like this:

  comma-separated = [ element, *(",", element) ]

This is not meant as an argument for or against; just an observation.

Edit: Amended comma separated EBNF to account for an empty list.

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Whether the marker is leading or trailing is orthogonal to whether the first/last marker is optional. And usually you want to have it optional in either case so that e.g. you can write `f(arg)` and don’t have to write `f(,arg)` or `f(arg,)`.

Hence it would be:

  leading-marker-list = [ element, *("-", element) ]

In actual code it's not much difference, e.g.:

  while (test("-")) { element() }

vs.

  do { element(); } while (test("-"))

It depends on your system of parsing. For example, code generated by a parser generator would be slightly more complex. A regular expression would also be slightly more complex.

I have written recursive descent parsers in the past, and if I remember correctly, the way I set things up, I had to handle leading list elements specially. It's possible that this was unnecessary and I was simply blinded to a simpler way of doing things because I was following the EBNF too strictly.

Edit: I noticed that we're not actually accounting for an empty list here. That makes things slightly more complex:

  comma-separated = [ element, *(",", element) ];

Your code would need to test if there is an element or a list terminator before processing the element.

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