[antlr-interest] xml grammar

[Martin Probst]

Hi,

> > state DEFAULT:
> >   ELEMENT_START -> ELEMENT_STATE:
> >     '<';
> > state ELEMENT_STATE:
> >   QNAME -> ATTR_LIST_STATE:
> >     ...;
> 
> Well, yes, I've considered allowing you to specify a start rule for  
> the lexer so you can do context-sensitive lexing.  Pretty cool, eh?   
> Only issue is, how do you call a random method in Java w/o function  
> pointers?  Reflection is SLOOOOW and not supported in all targets...

Can't you just have an "int state", DEFAULT = 1, ELEMENT_STATE = 2, etc.
and then switch over the state when lexing the next token? ->
ELEMENT_STATE then sets state to ELEMENT_STATE and your done - am I
missing something?

> > and so on. I guess it would be not so much work to implement that in
> > ANTLR, and it would be a really big improvement for people that  
> > have to
> > implement stateful lexers. Do you have any ideas on this?
> 
> Sure do! :)  Use the start rule idea, but also you can simply invoke  
> another lexer to handle everything for PCDATA or do it the other way:  
> have a special lexer for inside the tag.  Just call like an island  
> grammar, right?

Well, I was thinking more general (read: my XQuery Grammar ;-)), not
about XML itself.

Martin