[antlr-interest] Re: Issue & bug tracking for ANTLR

lgcraymer lgc at mail1.jpl.nasa.gov
Wed Nov 24 12:43:26 PST 2004



--- In antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com, Terence Parr <parrt at c...> wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2004, at 10:44 AM, Bryan Ewbank wrote:
> > Ter said, in response to a request for bug/issue tracking:
> >> Hi, thanks.  I may use a java-based solution or might spend a
> >> few days and build my own tailored system.  Probably can get
> >> a good student to build it. :)
> >
> > Ack!  Is that NIH rearing it's head?  Why not something that already 
> > lives?

Scarab <http://scarab.tigris.org/> gets pretty good reviews as being
easy to install, full-featured, and easy to use.  It is implemented
via Java Servlets.

> Ok, i'll uninvent ANTLR and StringTemplate since yacc and velocity 
> already live ;)

Apples and oranges.  ANTLR (nee PCCTS) is a significant step up over
table-driven LALR and parse trees.  StringTemplate sounds like (I
still haven't used it yet--something to learn this weekend) a novel
paradigm which also makes life easier.

> Seriously, I build my own stuff unless I find something that is better 
> than I can do (for my purposes) in a few days (you'll note that jGuru 
> uses resin and lucene as I can't do better myself and certainly not in 
> any kind of quick turnaround).  Case in point is my class file and byte 
> code assembler I built over a few days.  No dependency on BCEL or other 
> programs when installing antlr and my stuff is smaller.  Further, it 
> was fun!
> Remember my opinion of most "free" software ;)  I get frustrated and 
> then I build something to fix the situation.  Note that I'm conversing 

C'mon Ter--how many years have you lived off of Sun Java?  The above
is a neanderthal view, which you don't really practice--there is an
incredible amount of professionally written free software out there
these days.  Some of it is corporate flagship software released as
Open Source (eclipse, Java, OpenOffice, ...), some of it is useful
software tools which probably would either not be commercially
viable--it is hard to make money selling software tools these days--or
are to advance the state of the practice (JUnit and ArgoUML are good
examples of this), some of it is free because the underlying design
concepts are still undergoing evolution, and some of it is free as a
means of advertising professional skills.  User support for Open
Source software is often better than for an equivalent commercial
product--and, for software with active developers, the Open Source
product has a good chance of surpassing the commercial competition.

That said, there is also a considerable amount of non-professional,
single-developer software out there that is not well written.  Part of
the effort in adopting any software is that you have to do a product
analysis.  Is the software mature?  Is there a likelihood of support?
 Is there an active developer community?  And it ain't just the free
software for which that applies--there is a fair amount of dreck being
marketed commercially.  Caveat emptor!

> with Matt Benson at the moment to create HumAnt, a human readable 
> version of Ant with its filthy xml spec.  Oddly enough what I came up 
> with looks like make w/o the whitespace issue. ;)

Gack!!!  One of the nice things about modern IDEs is that they
generate Ant or make code for you, and provide wizards to guide you
through the rarely used ("advanced") features when needed.  Textual
representations of dependency relationships are good for processing,
but mediocre for communicating to humans.  The "filthy xml spec" is a
feature--it is just enough pain that people have been driven to put
together friendly GUI front ends.  Makefiles are traditionally
incomprehensible to the average user--how would HumAnt be an
improvement with a make-like syntax?

Cheers!

--Loring

> Ter
> --
> CS Professor & Grad Director, University of San Francisco
> Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
> Cofounder, http://www.jguru.com
> Cofounder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!





 
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