[antlr-interest] Suggestions for ANTLRworks

Steve Bennett stevagewp at gmail.com
Mon Feb 18 09:03:08 PST 2008


Some minor bugs/suggestions for the ANTLRworks developers:

- The AST pane should be cleared when a new debug session is begun.
Currently it seems to only be cleared when the first AST node is
constructed.
- Automatically select the "Text" radio button in "Input Text" window
when text is entered into the field. (Or disable that field when the
radio button is not selected).
- There are situations where ANTLRworks fails to recompile a changed
grammar. Eg, begin debugging/compiling, then cancel, then press debug
again - an old compiled version is used.
- Have another syntax highlight colour for syntactic predicates -
would be good to make them less obtrusive.
- Make it possible to permanently hide the "Rule" and "Root" debug
panes. I find they just take up space and are pretty fiddly to hide.
- More feedback on the lexing process? It's good that you can see what
tokens are matched, but it's hard to tell what's wrong when text
doesn't match any token...?
- Clicking on an AST node could take you to the parser rule...
- Move the debug buttons to the main toolbar. Or at least the stop
button - it's inconvenient to have to change to the debug tab just to
be able to terminate the session.
- If possible, don't invalidate the syntax diagrams the instant you
change the grammar - it makes it difficult to fix warnings, as every
time you fix one, the diagrams are gone again.
- Show the 'tokens' element in the navigation treeview on the left.
- An option to hide all completed synpreds in the parse tree. Once a
rule has completely matched, it'd be nice to hide all the green and
red trees leading up to it.
- Colour highlighting in the alternate parse tree view.
- Support more Windows shortcut keys: shift+del is the most important
- Don't de-maximise the grammar window when pressing ctrl+F (if possible)
- "Toggle syntax diagram" button seems redundant: why not generate the
syntax diagram if that tab is selected, don't generate it otherwise?
- Double click on a console line to take you to the relevant grammar
line (presumably can scan for grammarname.g:999:9 ...)
- (I just notice that errors apparently generate little red flags in
the right margin - perhaps the left margin would be more eye
catching...)
- Right-click shortcut to generate synpred: selected text foo becomes
(foo) => foo
- Some feedback on "remove all left recursion" - didn't produce any
message or anyhting when I tried.

ANTLRworks is truly an amazing tool, thanks very much for developing it!

Steve


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