[antlr-interest] Re: suggested ANTLR projects?

[tbrandonau]

As far as the Workbench, I would suggest considering Netbeans rather 
than Eclipse as they have more stuff for that sort of thing until 
(and if) the Harmonia 
(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~harmonia/harmonia/index.html) 
Eclipseport comes out. Eclipse have, from the brief look at their 
site (don't use it) no support for Editors (I imagine there's support 
for adding them but nothing for making them). Netbeans on the other 
hand have a Lexer module (http://lexer.netbeans.org/) that does 
incremental lexing using an Antlr lexer (interesting in itself). 
There is a syntax colouring bridge that allows for the creation of a 
Swing editor set on top of such a lexer. Which IDE is better is a big 
question, but perhaps Netbeans is better for developing, which is 
important here. There is an Antlr project for Netbeans but it is no 
longer maintained and is out of date with the Netbeans APIs, so would 
pretty much be a rewrite.

As to grammars, I would suggest a rewrite of the Antlr grammar and 
possibly the Antlr tool on top of it. To create a TreeParser and put 
the code generation hooks in that rather than the Parser. This could 
then be built on for Antlr 3, and would be helpful (if not necessary) 
for an Antlr editing tool (if you do high-level analysis, the Antlr 
lexer ain't too bad, and is seperate from the rest, bar the nasty 
options\tokens\actions hack).

Incremental lexing\parsing is another idea. As I said Netbeans have a 
incremental lexer built on top of Netbeans, creating such a framework 
as part of Antlr could be interesting. Incremental lexing ain't that 
hard, in theory, check out some of the articles on the Harmonia site 
for details (e.g. "General incremental lexical analysis" in the 
Ensemble section). In fact the Netbeans support could be improved 
upon, incremental lexing gains from having a way to in effect return 
multiple tokens at a time, to tell the incremental lexer not to try 
an resume in the middle of a token (e.g. in Antlr you want to 
return "options {" as two tokens: LITERAL_options and LCURLY but you 
want to lex it in a single rule) so either non-restartable tokens or 
returning multiple tokens from one lexer rule is desirable, neither 
of which the Netbeans lexer supports. Incremental LL(k) parsing is 
another matter, all the Harmonia stuff is on LR and then you start to 
need a fully fledged versioned document system (see Harmonia stuff, 
not CVS, but a document where each token is versioned to support 
incremental processing) but the theory for incremental LL(k) parsing 
is all there, and so is an implementation using Antlr.

Tom.

--- In antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com, Terence Parr <parrt at c...> 
wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 09:31 AM, Jim O'Connor wrote:
> 
> >  Hi Terence,
> >   The ANTLR IDE "workbench" in Eclipse sounds like fun.  My tasks 
for 
> > the
> > next few months are in line with this type of endeavor.  I would 
be 
> > glad to
> > help.  I might be a better co-student than a project director but 
you 
> > might
> > find it hard to turn down free/willing help.  Let me know.
> 
> Hi Jim (and others that responded).
> 
> Sounds like Monty has offered to "manage" the IDE project prototype 
> this Fall and he makes the most sense I'd say.  I might be doing 
> another project next semester though ;)
> 
> Also, I'm going to see if I can get students to build grammars.  
Can 
> people suggest grammars they want built?  They might have to 
describe 
> it to the students. ;)
> 
> I'm also going to ask a studnet to help finish the antlr.org 
site. :)
> 
> Ter
> 
> >   Jim
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Terence Parr
> > To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
> > Sent: 8/5/03 3:56 PM
> > Subject: [antlr-interest] suggested ANTLR projects?
> >
> > Howdy.  I am teaching a master's project class at USF this 
semester and
> > am going to offer to direct a project involving ANTLR.  Can people
> > suggest a bite-size semester-long project that a group of students
> > could do?  I'm thinking that Loring Craymer will suggest a start 
on the
> > ANTLR IDE "workbench" that would display syntax diagrams from 
grammars
> > and perhaps highlight grammar ambiguities.
> >
> > Beyond making a few project suggestions, does anybody out there 
want to
> > help direct one of the projects?  It would be a loose 
confederation
> > where you could be as involved as you want.  Anything from some 
initial
> > phone conference calls (or showing up if you are around san 
francisco)
> > to actually taking an active role in guiding a project.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Terence
> > --
> > Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
> > Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
> > Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
> > Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
> > Co-founder, http://www.peerscope.com pure link sharing
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> >
> --
> Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
> Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
> Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
> Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
> Co-founder, http://www.peerscope.com pure link sharing


 

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