[antlr-interest] ANTLR Workshop/Tutorial

[Phil Ritchie]

Loring
 
Lots of good advice and encouragement, thanks.


----- Original Message ----
From: Loring Craymer <lgcraymer at yahoo.com>
To: Phil Ritchie <endigitalmind at yahoo.co.uk>; antlr-interest at antlr.org
Sent: Wednesday, 19 July, 2006 11:39:13 PM
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] ANTLR Workshop/Tutorial

Phil--

1.)  No.  ANTLR is very good for record-based files.  File formats have simple and unambiguous grammars.

2.)  If you are a newbie, don't use ANTLR 3 now--wait for the documentation, including a tutorial (Ter will be using it to teach with:  that will make sure the documentation is wrung out).  Use ANTLR 2--the documentation is solid, you can ask questions on the list and get very good feedback, and it will solve your problem.  You may run into occasional issues with the LL(k)-approximate lookahead (reports of nondeterminisms that aren't really there), but feedback from the list will put you on the right track.

Porting a grammar from ANTLR 2 to ANTLR 3 should not be difficult unless you do a lot of manual tree manipulation--you have no pressing need to be an early adopter.  You should use StringTemplate for code generation, though--it makes a big difference, although there too the documentation could and will be improved.

--Loring

Phil Ritchie <endigitalmind at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: 
Two questions that are borne of frustration at my rate of progress in becoming really proficient with antlr:

1. Am I really mad trying to use antlr to build parsers and translators for essentially record-based files?
2. Are there any antlr version 3 fluent people in Dublin, Ireland that would be willing and able to give one or two workshops/interactive tutorials?

Phil.





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