[antlr-interest] speaking of => etc...

[Jim Idle]

I don't disagree in fact - especially the % bit, which was a lame joke
;-). I was just wondering whether there was some way to make it more
accessible to people starting out, the new tree rewrite stuff should
help quite a bit though because now I think about it, most of the
questions in the group seem to be about the syntax for that in ANTLR 2. 

IMO the ANTLR 3 Tree stuff is much more intuitive, but then again, once
you have stared at things long enough, almost anything starts to become
familiar (though I am not going to start using Perl or Python any time
soon myself).

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Probst [mailto:mail at martin-probst.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 2:43 PM
To: Jim Idle
Cc: Bill Canfield; antlr-interest at antlr.org
Subject: RE: [antlr-interest] speaking of => etc...

Hi,

> Actually I wonder about the option of making a verbose and a symbolic
> syntax. Most people look at things akin: {fred} ##<$>><1>//!!%

I'm also a fan of a more wordy syntax in general (we all hate Perl,
don't we?) but in the case of ANTLR I think it wouldn't help much.

People are used to use special characters for all the magic in language
recognition, and using full words within the rules (as opposed to
"scope" etc.) would limit the choice of rule names. Adding a special
character in front of the word is the worst of the two worlds, imho.

Martin