[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3.0 tree construction proposal
Loring Craymer
Loring.G.Craymer at jpl.nasa.gov
Wed Feb 2 11:05:14 PST 2005
At 09:29 AM 2/2/2005, John D. Mitchell wrote:
> >>>>> "Loring" == Loring Craymer <Loring.G.Craymer at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
>[...]
>
> >> Huh? You're talking about generating all of my tree grammars for me?
> >> Did
>
> > Modulo refactoring, yes. And the set of refactorings for grammars looks
> > to be reasonably small--about 10 or so. That's the key reason I
> > developed a target-language-independent construction syntax in the first
> > place: when you specify the transformation, you provide enough
> > information to define a corresponding tree grammar which can then be
> > refactored into a useful form. The only piece missing right now is the
> > insertion analysis.
>
>Hmm... But that presumes a constructivist approach. I.e., one would have
>to create the phases in order so that this automated tree grammar would be
>constructed. Sometimes, it's much better to e.g., work backwards from the
>tree that you want and then determine the (sequence of) transformations to
>make that.
So you sketch backward and then implement forward. The key is that
automatic tree generation makes the implement forward phase very fast (I
did tree transformation development for a pretty complete expression
grammar in about 2 hours).
>In that sense, I guess that I'm saying that I'm less concerned with
>automated tree grammar construction and very concerned with being able to
>check that the output conforms of a phase conforms to the input of other
>phases (i.e., the so-called tree diff tool).
Check out <http://developer.berlios.de/projects/tdm/>. It uses SAX parsing
(shudder), but should be adaptable to an ANTLR front end.
>Thanks,
> John
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