[antlr-interest] Understanding priorities in lexing (newbie)

[Kay Roepke]

On Jul 14, 2007, at 1:29 AM, Gavin Lambert wrote:

> At 21:48 13/07/2007, Kay Roepke wrote:
> >Once we have the ANTLR grammar ported to v3 I'll start working
> >on an editor, too. ANTLRWorks is cool, I love it, but I really
> >really do not like Java desktop apps, esp. on the Mac.
>
> Would it be more palatable if you could change the look&feel so it  
> *looks* like a Mac app?

Well, I don't care about the looks so much, as long as it's behaving  
itself. This is not my issue with ANTLRWorks at all.
I think its interface is very usable, kudos to pull this off with  
Swing, Jean!

> Because (at least if it's using Swing) there's a bunch of classes  
> in com.sun.java.swing.plaf.* that can be selected between to change  
> the appearance of a Java app.  Not sure if they have one for Mac,  
> though, but I would presume so.

It already uses the Mac user interface elements, so it's not the  
look. Rather it's Java. I constantly have the impression that it is  
sluggish, and that's probably nothing Jean can fix. IntelliJ IDEA is  
a very good app, too, but it's sluggish also. I've been doing a lot  
of Java lately, and as my preferred type of computer is a Mac I use  
that. But I have seriously considered booting Windows to do Java  
coding, just to get the better Java support (since Sun long stopped  
providing a JVM implementation, dropping everything on Apple).

That's the only reason I want to have a Mac-native ANTLR editor. It's  
not the features, it's not the UI, it's the Java. I know why it's  
important to have ANTLRWorks as a Swing-Java app, really there's no  
way around that, considering Jean is the sole author (AFAIK). But on  
a decent machine with 3 gigs of RAM, it should be blindingly fast. It  
isn't, I can tell you, esp. if I have my "normal" work environment  
open, i.e. browsers, lots of terminal windows, IntelliJ, ANTLRWorks  
and all the other thingies I need. The memory footprint is probably  
the culprit. Whatever. I like the tool, but want to have an  
alternative. In the spirit of opensource: This is a user option. The  
user wants it, he writes it.

cheers,
-k
-- 
Kay Röpke
http://classdump.org/