[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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