[antlr-interest] ANTLR Kudos...

Ian Kaplan iank at bearcave.com
Wed Aug 13 20:04:08 PDT 2008


  I'm not very good at suffering in silence and the transition between ANTLR
2.X and ANTLR 3.X has been a painful one.  I have had to more or less
rewrite all of the Java code associated with my grammar rules.  But along
with the whining it is only reasonable to also talk about the good things.

  The ANTLR backtracking parser is really great.  At least in terms of its
accepting grammars.  The back tracking parser gives you the freedom to use a
grammar would be difficult in LL(2) (ANTLR 2.X) or even LL(*).  As a result,
the grammar is more readable (less left factoring) and the designer has much
more freedom to design a language as they want, rather than what can be
supported by the parser generator.  Going to ANTLR 3.X has been painful, but
in the end, I have to say it is worth it so far.

  I do have a couple of worries.  One is performance.  In my case, unless
performance is really terrible should not be too be a problem since the
language I'm working on is a graph database query language and the queries
are never going to be that big compared to, say, Java or C++ code.  Another
worry I have is about the backtracking.  I admit that I have not RTFM (e.g.,
the last chapters of The Book that deal with this topic).  My hope is that
the match tries to match the longest sequence first, so that a match is not
missed.

   In summary, I send my thanks to Terance and Co. for the great work on
ANTLR 3.  It's a tool that has allowed me more freedom than I've ever had
before with a parser generator.

  Ian
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