[antlr-interest] bridging the gap

[jhking at airmail.net]

I have the "Definitive Guide..." book and have learned quite a bit from it.  What
I'm looking for (and this may be a "how to parse" question not an ANTLR question
is something more involved than the calc example that's explained.
I'm an MIS not CS guy so never got formal parser/language generation training but
have several itches that I think Antlr can help me scratch.

Our primary environment is PL/SQL (which looks a lot like Ada-83 + sql elements)
and I want to build two things:
1)  A comparison utility that compares parse trees or something that can ignore
insignificant changes.  PL/SQL is case-insensitive except within quoted strings
and its a bear to get a file comparison utility to deal with that.
2)  A pl/sql to java conversion utility, this is a long way off but I think if I
can learn enough to do #1 then I'm better than half-way to this.

I see example pl/sql grammars and I want to utilize those but at this point I
don't know enough to fully understand them, which means I'll have a hard time
extending them or understanding the errors if the pl/sql source I'm parsing has
features not yet in the example grammars.

I'm not asking anybody to do either of these things for me (that would be a
professional engagement worth more money than I can afford) I just need some kind
of a "parsers for dummies" book to get me further along.

Thanks for your kind attention.
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