[antlr-interest] Question about antlr 3 AST tree building
Vinh N. Pham
vnpham.us at gmail.com
Mon Sep 11 09:17:22 PDT 2006
Hi,
First of all, I would like to thanks the antr developers for the
wonderful tool. It is one of the best parser generators I've ever used.
I'm currently have some difficulty of using antlr 3. In one of my
project, I want to write a parser for a language, produce the AST for
other developers to use as input so that they can get the information
and do whatever translations they want. Since most of other developers
are not computer scientists, I think it is best to describe the AST tree
in term of the target language (Java or C++) for them without referring
about antlr or tree parser/walker at all because that means they have to
learn another tool. However, in antlr 3, the tree construction
mechanism only build tree with type Object, and it is difficult to get a
particular data member because it doesn't have a descriptive name. Of
course, I can create the whole tree manually but I'm hoping there are
some mechanisms in antlr 3 to do this automatically. After all, all
information needed are already in the grammar file.
Also, if even if we use the tree parser, what should we do if we
need more than one way to do the translation from of the same node (an
expression node for example)? Using more than one tree parser may be a
little bit confusing.
for example, can we do this in the same grammar file
subroutineName1=expression: ......... will be translated to
subroutine named subroutineName1
subroutineName2=expression: ......... will be translated to
subroutine named subroutineName2
Please let me know what I should use
Thanks,
Vinh N. Pham
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