[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3 dev status?

Terence Parr parrt at cs.usfca.edu
Wed Mar 16 10:51:06 PST 2005


On Mar 16, 2005, at 8:39 AM, David Jung wrote:

> Terence,
>     Can you give us an idea what the current dev status
> of ANTLR 3 is?  Is the source available somewhere?
> I'm bascially wondering if it is early days and likely
> won't be available for a year or more, or if perhaps
> it is further along than that.
> If it was around alpha-level I'd be interested to
> test it out.

Hi David,

Thanks for your interest.  The project is going extremely well.  I just 
went down to visit the hip cats in Apple's dev tools group with Jean 
Bovet, the maniac USF grad student.  We demo'd his ANTLR IDE and 
discussed ANTLR 3.0.

The basic status is that the tool seems to work. ;)  It correctly reads 
in the Java grammar and generates a recognizer in Java (and bytecodes) 
that seems to parse Java properly...*and* more quickly than ANTLR 2.x, 
but I need to really do more tests.  The interesting thing is that I 
removed syntactic predicates from the grammar and the 3.0 prototype 
still handled the grammar. :)  The only warnings are are true grammar 
ambiguities (same input, multiple ways to match).

I'm hoping to have an early access version at end of May or early June 
including Jean's GUI (which totally kicks ass by the way).

New version currently does not have tree mechanism or any rewrite 
stuff, but it does do parsers/lexers and with the fabulous new LL(*) 
algorithm.  A much better error recovery strategy is done.  New 
attribute mechanism is done.  I'm working on the interpreter and 
debugging protocol.  Then tool clean up, some optimizations.  Ric 
Klaren may have the C code generator working by then (I keep changing 
things out from underneath him).  We'll have internationalized error 
messages (with perhaps English, French at that point).

Anyway, my goal is to get a solid base system done that knows how to 
parse / lex shortly, with full semantic predicate hoisting.  Then, 
after first early-release, I'll add tree stuff etc... once I settle on 
what I want.

Oh, and I have *no* documentation other than my blogs so far.  Only 
minor syntax differences with 2.x, however.

I think you'll like this new version, David.  I'd be happy for you to 
play with it in a few short months!

Ter
--
CS Professor & Grad Director, University of San Francisco
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
Cofounder, http://www.jguru.com



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