[antlr-interest] new book organization question
Terence Parr
parrt at cs.usfca.edu
Wed Aug 20 11:50:21 PDT 2008
On Aug 19, 2008, at 11:48 PM, Dennis Benzinger wrote:
>> I. Introduction
>> basic architectures, describe application categories,
>> introduce language implementation ideas.
>>
>> II. Generators (before readers because it's easier to understand)
>>
>> III. Readers (parsing, introduces all of the intermediate data
>> structures too)
>> [...]
>
> I'd prefer to have the Readers part before the Generators part. You
> first have to parse something before you can generate something out of
> it.
Well,That was an interesting paradox I had to solve. basically, I
realized that explaining how to print out "3.152e-13" is much easier
than explaining how to recognize it properly. but, how can I talk
about generators without talking about readers first. It turns out, we
can do lots of things. The examples I chose include object to
relational mapping (uses reflection) and a vector math to postscript
translator that turns the printer into a vector math interpreter. At
first, I have a set of handbuilt objects to represent operations. A
GUI or something else could easily build these without resorting to a
reader. Then I morph that into more of a standard tree structure and
show how to use templates and so on to generate the appropriate
postscript.
Then when I do readers, it will start to fall into place. :) Do you
think that will work?
> And because you wrote that "each part will use techniques and
> patterns identified in the previous parts" I find it quite confusing
> to
> have Readers after Generators.
Agreed if you look just at the table of contents. You think my
approach will work as explained above?
> Does the Readers part build upon
> Generators?
Well, In fact it does the reader section now knows what its target is:
trees. :) It provides the goal before the thing that can create those
data structures.
Ter
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