[antlr-interest] Re: PERL VS ANTLR

[Terence Parr]

On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 11:10 AM, cintyram 
<cintyram at yahoo.com> wrote:

> you are right, and i stand corrected ;
> my answer was not comprehensive enough to state that antlr does not
> support all cfgs but only predicated LL ; on the other hand , though i
> must admit to my being not the expert on this, LR grammars can be
> represented by an equivalent LL grammar ;
> i remember having done some exercises on this in the compiler theory
> class ;

Actually LR(k) is only as strong as LL(k) if you put actions on the 
left-edge of every production, forcing the LR parser to know where it's 
at on the left-edge just like an LL(k) parser.

The thing to remember is that all languages are "turing complete" so 
can implement pretty much anything, however, you should focus on 
efficiency of expression.  ANTLR is a domain-specific language designed 
to make building parsers/translators easier.  PERL for the most part 
makes you implement parsers by hand.  Also, isn't PERL optimized to 
work on a line-by-line basis?  Can it easily match an HTML tag, for 
example, spanning 5 lines?

Ter
--
Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator: http://www.antlr.org
Lecturer in Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco


 

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