[antlr-interest] new book organization question

Dennis Benzinger Dennis.Benzinger at gmx.net
Fri Aug 22 10:26:18 PDT 2008


Am 20.08.2008 20:50, Terence Parr schrieb:
> 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?

As I'm the only one who complained I think it 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?
> [...]

Yes. And I'll just start reading the book at the Readers part.


Bye,
Dennis Benzinger


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