[antlr-interest] Re: thoughts on source-to-source workshop at oopsla 2004

Terence Parr parrt at cs.usfca.edu
Sun Oct 31 09:19:59 PST 2004



On Oct 31, 2004, at 8:07 AM, atripp54321 wrote:
>>> I also found that examples like the "main" one above
>>> seemed to be about the
>>> most complicated examples shown for AST translation languages
>>> like TXL. When in fact, that "main" example is one of the
>>> simplest rules, and I have many hundreds of rules, most more
>>> complicated than that.
>>
>> Sounds like you and I should talk on the phone sometime when i get 
>> more
>> time to think about a simple general rewrite system.  Where were you
>> during the workshop!? ;)
>
> Not invited :( Probably just as well, as I'd have probably
> been more vocal than even you about things.

I'm pretty opinionated so I'm not sure ;)

>  That's not good,
> as I'm not a well-respected guru in this field like you are :)

Well, thanks, but in that crowd I'm not respected much probably.  They 
have to invite me because all their grad students use ANTLR (the 
"popular vote"), but the academics (the "electoral college") think my 
work is pure engineering. ;)

>>> I found that I was just getting bogged down trying to keep ASTs
>>> in my head. I felt it was much easier to write translation rules
>>> in simple text as shown with the "-->" separator above. That way,
>>> you never even have to think about ASTs much.
>>
>> Do you do multiple passes or all translations in a single?  What kind
>> of "engine" did the replacing?
>
> Multiple passes...several hundred passes in fact :)

Wow!

> The problem I have now is not in being able to write very
> complex rules, it's keeping all those rules in an order
> that works. For example, I fire the "make any functions
> that are missing a return type return 'int'" rule before
> the "change the 'int main()' C function to the equivalent
> Java method" rule.

Ah, yeah, sounds like order would be really important.

> Here's a very high-level design description:
> http://jazillian.com/design.html
> And here's an English description of what many of my rules
> are doing:
> http://jazillian.com/how.html
>
> I'll be writing a complete writeup of the design in a couple
> of weeks, I'll post a link when it's ready.

Sounds great.

I have to nail the lexing, parsing component of ANTLR 3.0 before 
proceeding to the extra goodies.  The code generator must also be 
cleaned up etc...

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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