[antlr-interest] Comments and questions on a recent project
Terence Parr
parrt at jguru.com
Mon Aug 26 11:34:22 PDT 2002
On Monday, August 26, 2002, at 06:06 AM, Tiller, Michael (M.M.) wrote:
> The first issue that comes to mind is the fact that at the start of
> the project, I essentially had to choose my target language up front.
> I found that quite annoying. I saw some comments in the group about
> Ter not wanting to put language stuff on the command line. I'm not
> sure I ever saw the exact argument against this, but as a practical
> matter I found it quite annoying. The result is that I had to put a
> few (not many) language specific bits in my grammar (target language
> option, handling of newlines, comments, etc). I would have preferred
> to keep it "pristine" for other potential users.
Parsers are mostly worthless by themselves in my experience. When was
the last time anybody needed a C compiler that said "yes, it's valid C
code" instead of "here's your machine code"? <wink>. So, you must have
actions within the grammar even to build (nontrivial) trees. Actions
imply a language and hence the grammar should be the one not the
command-line to specify the language. If you only wanted a parser and
you could build trees automatically in a language independent way (see
Loring's new stuff) *then* a command line option is useful :)
Good question! A feature for a future ANTLR.
Ter
--
Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator: http://www.antlr.org
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