[antlr-interest] philosophy about translation

Loring Craymer lgcraymer at yahoo.com
Sat Oct 28 00:23:22 PDT 2006


Sheesh.  Can we please stop rehashing late 70's
technology and get away from ignorance of modern
rewrite systems?  A friend of mine--Ron Ayres--did one
of the first such systems for his PhD thesis in the
late '70's and subsequently used it as a core
technology for Silicon Compilers and then for MOSIS. 
Somewhere I have a copy of a paper from the early
'80's advocating the use of iterative pattern matching
for rewriting parse trees.  The current easily
available pattern-matching transformation systems
(rule-based) include TXL (http://www.txl.ca)and
stratego
(http://www.stratego-language.org/Stratego/WebHome). 
Both are open source; the power and quirks of such
systems are well documented.

I can understand why Andy found TXL unsatisfactory: 
it is a pure interpreter, and that makes it unsuitable
for producing a packaged product.  Stratego generates
C, but it requires doing at least a minimal literature
search to find and is not so well-known as TXL.

There are innovative possibilities for using rewrite
systems with ANTLR, and I would certainly be
interested in hearing of anyone exploring them.  For
that matter, I would be quite interested in hearing of
anyone using TXL for working with ANTLR grammars. 
However, I get tired of being told about the use of
rule-based systems for simple HLL to HLL translations:
 there are some nice TXL examples of this already.

--Loring


 
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