[antlr-interest] Revamping languages education? [was: ambigouslexer tokens]

Jim Idle jimi at temporal-wave.com
Thu Jun 28 11:50:09 PDT 2007



> -----Original Message-----
> From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Terence Parr
>
> On Jun 28, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:
> 
> > El 28/6/2007, a las 17:10, Jim Idle escribió:
> >> But you cannot just go barging in on it - first you have to learn
> >> what
> >> the expectations are. The tool is a complicated to thing to
> >> produce, but
> >> once you have your head around a few concepts it is remarkably
> >> easy to
> >> use.
> >
> > Hmmm... But Jim, don't forget that as the C target author you're
> > speaking as one of the foremost ANTLR experts...

[snip]
 
> Anyway, i'll investigate language education again when I do my grad
> class Spring 2008.  In the meantime, I encourage you to soldier on.
> Language concepts and ANTLR can be tricky at first, but usually there
> is an "ah ha!" moment, which I think is what Jim is alluding to.

Exactly in fact. Almost all recent activity in this group concerning ANTLR3 has been regarding the same 5 or 6 things (I exclude bugs in the C runtime to spare the author ;-). When all these 5 or 6 things are learned together then typing in the grammars that have been thrown about here is second nature (honestly) and you can produce it ANTLRWorks with little effort to rid yourself of ambiguity because you won't type it in that way. I suppose we ought to have some sort of crib sheet for this stuff, but everyone is busy of course and so we will get there via the book and wiki and so on. This is what I mean by learning the expectations first.

Now, creating a full recognizer for T-SQL or C++ is in fact still a big deal, so you don't want to choose that as your first project as here you are heading down the compiler write path expounded upon by Ter somewhat, depending on what you want to do with the recognizer of course.

Jim

PS: C++ Target work starts next week.
PPS: Unless anyone has any contract work they want me to do, as my current contract ends tomorrow :-)


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