[antlr-interest] Re: Enhance ANTLR support for comments?

David Wigg wiggjd at sbu.ac.uk
Fri Jul 18 04:52:24 PDT 2003


I would like to support this suggestion strongly.

When I was saving comments I "overloaded?" the consume function 
which enabled me to interleave the comments again using line 
numbers (and that's another thing which should be in standard 
ANTLR, Line and Column numbers!). It was horrendous and I don't 
think it ever worked perfectly!

At the time I tried working out a system of giving comments a 
special type number (as Andy suggests) which the parser would 
know to ignore (such as zero) but provide a feature (in 
consume?) which would enable us to pick up the comments after 
parsing in the correct sequence (I don't think it would matter 
whether multi-line or end-of-line if they were in sequence) but 
I gave up because I didn't have the time to understand all the 
antlr support code.

I agree that saying you can do all these things by using this or 
that technique is quite unhelpful. We are not all steeped in 
understanding how ANTLR works, we use a car but we don't have to 
know how it works, and we are not all programming geniuses 
anyway (as much as we'd like to think we were pretty good at it!).

David
Research Fellow
Centre for Systems and Software Engineering
South Bank University
London, UK.


 

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