[antlr-interest] real-life programs

[Johannes Luber]

Peter Bulychev schrieb:
> Hello.
> 
> Thank for answering my previous question. I want to reformulate it more 
> generally now. Of course, I can get the answers on some points by 
> myself, but if you answer me, it will  save my time great and maybe it 
> will be useful to somebody else in future.
> 
>    1. Is ANTRL suitable to parse real-life programs? For instance, is it
>       possible to write a grammar, using which I will be able to parse
>       all C# projects from SourceForge? I agree with fact of missing
>       some details such as preprocessing directives but I want all files
>       to be parsed. Maybe, the grammar should be less strict than the
>       programming language.

Yes, I'm working on a C# grammar myself, so I can say that it is 
possible to parse C#. The only exception is a corner case of the C# 
preprocessor, but the likelyhood of appearing is small, as it can't be 
really abused (although one should check if the corner case actually 
appeared and tell the programmer to rewrite it).

#ifdef A
/*
#else
*/
#endif

showcases the problem.

>    2. Can I modify this grammar to generate AST representations of
>       real-life programs?

Yes.

>    3. Is it possible to work with scopes of variables?

Yes.

> I want to "glue
>       together" all leaves with the same variable.

You want to turn the tree into a graph then? Not sure if you have to do 
it that way. I suppose putting the same reference into the leaves will 
suffice and you don't lose information about the original position of 
the token.

Johannes