Clarify difference between SyntaxNodeKind and syntactic category

[sgraf812]

What question should the reference manual answer?

I'm reading up on macros. Just as last time I did so, I got confused about the difference between a node's "syntax kind" and "syntactic categories". Could the manual entry for "syntax kind" (which btw. simply points to the node constructor ATM instead of SyntaxNodeKind) have a sentence to distinguish the two? Could there be an additional sentence involving an example?

Additional context

From grepping around I think that "syntax kind" corresponds to the name of an AST data constructor in parsers that I'm used to, and "syntactic category" (the entry of which is crisp) is the open data type into which such a constructor injects. Not sure if that's a useful analogy, especially if you have never heard of abstract syntax trees.

[david-christiansen]

This is a great thing to add - thanks for pointing it out.

I think your understanding is correct here.

In traditional grammar lingo, a syntax category is a nonterminal and a syntax kind is essentially a named production. The correspondence isn't 100% but that's quite close.