[antlr-interest] Language-Neutral Actions

Oliver Zeigermann oliver.zeigermann at gmail.com
Fri Apr 15 06:40:19 PDT 2005


Or maybe something like language neutral setting of properties with
data retrieved in parsing. In Java this could be filling of beans. I
think in C# there is a similar and even more complete mechanism.

Oliver

On 4/15/05, Scott Stanchfield <scott at javadude.com> wrote:
> I'd really like to see language-neutral actions in ANTLR 3.
> 
> The basic idea is that all action code is simply calls to behavior methods
> in some other object.
> 
> Depending on what target language is specified, different "glue" code is
> formed to contact that other object.
> 
> This would allow a grammar to be targeted to pretty much any language.
> 
> Some old parser generators I used did things like
> 
>   foo: fee fie fo @doSomething(fee,fie,fo);
> 
> which would allow you to target it to multiple languages. The parser
> generator would change @doSomething(...) into whatever was appropriate for
> the target language.
> 
> I don't know that we'd want to use the same syntax (I like the {...} for
> actions), but we could have a grammar option that specifies language-netrual
> actions and all {...} code is assumed neutral.
> 
> Thoughts?
> -- Scott
> 
>


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