[antlr-interest] nesting rules, getting rule text

[mzukowski at yci.com]

The best thing I can think of for you can do is to keep track of your
questions, preferably in one place so when someone sits down to write the
O'Reilly book we'll have a good list to start from.  

Perhaps you have archived your emails?  I'm not ready to try to organize all
that right now, but someday one of us will be.  When Terence, Loring and I
got together about ANTLR 3 the two questions were "What do people want to
do?" and "How can we best make it easy to use?"--which to me includes
documentation, explanation, FAQs, all that stuff.  

Myself, I tend to answer email questions, but the really big questions like
what should my tree look like or how to optimize are things I can't answer
with much detail in half an hour and currently I don't have the time to
write those kinds of guides.

Yeah, the other question was "Why don't people get this?"  Tree building,
tree parsing, left factoring, we're looking for the stumbling blocks but we
don't see them because we already "Get it."

When I sit down to write the best thing I could have in front of me would be
a diary of "aha"s.  What did you learn, what did you think before you
learned it?  How could it be introduced better for your learning style?

I understand you have frustrations, getting more specific details really
would help us target our efforts.  

Monty

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Youngman [mailto:Anthony.Youngman at ECA-International.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 3:19 AM
To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [antlr-interest] nesting rules, getting rule text

The problem I find is actually FINDING all this stuff. I have a bit of
an aversion to hypertext, much prefer a linear hard copy in front of me,
and find RMS's addiction to "info" for GNU documentation highly
offensive ...

Anyway, enough of the rant ... and I know - the rule is "if you want it,
why don't you write it", but a FAQ, clearly signposted, that consists of
a mildly complicated, highly documented, teaching grammar would be well
received. There are some wonderful resources out there, but IME it's
been a case of either pointers to "get you started" stuff, or a case of
"look at the supplied grammars" (but which one do I want to study for a
"teach yourself" course?).

I'm not saying there isn't anything out there, but I am frustrated time
and time again in that I seem to find either elementary stuff aimed at
newbies, or reference stuff aimed at experts. It's almost impossible to
find stuff aimed at the "I know you're experienced but have never met
this before" level guy. When I started programming in C I went on a
"Beginning C for experienced programmers" course - the prerequisite
being you had to know one - any - computer language well but were
presumed to know nothing about C at all. Where do you find stuff like
that?

Cheers,
Wol
...


 
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