[antlr-interest] Constructing trees and building forests...

iank at bearcave.com iank at bearcave.com
Wed Jul 28 22:43:01 PDT 2004


  Ter,

  Thanks for the reply.

  I know that I'm in a minority here, but to me the power of ANTLR is
  mainly in parser generation, not tree construction.  My views are
  biased by the fact that most of the parsers I've worked on are for
  languages like C, Fortran 90, Verilog or VHDL.  In my opinion when
  you are constructing trees for complex languages, you want to create
  you own trees.  So I have been largely uninterested in ANTLR's
  automatic tree construction.

  I understand that the contrary view is that ANTLR is very powerful
  for building source to source translaters and parsers for little
  languages.  And there tree construction is very useful.

  This said, my two cents is for an easy to use, easy to understand,
  robust parser generator that makes creating parsers for complex
  languages as easy as possible.  Rather than trees I'd rather have
  something that makes it easy to understand why the parser generator
  does not like my grammar.  

  From my point of view, trees are secondary.  Building trees is not
  that hard.  Writing parsers by hand is.  So the "juice" provided by
  ANTLR is that it helps with the most difficult part of parser
  construction.

  Of course it's easy for me to say...  Terence, Loring and others are
  doing all the work.  Those who write the code get to call the
  shots.  And, as always, I deeply appreciate the work that has gone
  into ANTLR.

  Ian


 
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