[antlr-interest] A postmortem of my use of antler
Benjamin Shropshire
shro8822 at vandals.uidaho.edu
Mon Mar 10 16:52:22 PDT 2008
Richard Clark wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> You brought up a really good idea -- a "what can you use this for"
> document that shows a handful of common uses. I also want to think
> about how to improve the initial learning pieces on the Wiki.
>
> A handful of thoughts from an old hand (who wrote or edited a bunch of
> intro material on the Wiki):
> 1. We could probably get enough up on the Wiki to help someone make an
> initial evaluation of ANTLR, but developing with it pretty much
> requires buying the book from the Pragmatic Programmers. (Which it
> sounds like you've done, thank you. I could make that requirement
> clearer on the Wiki.)
> 2. Really understanding what's going on sometimes requires a look at
> the generated code and/or the runtime support classes. I understand
> you .Net folks are dealing with a bit of a black box there.
If I had to do more, I'd look more into getting the debugger to walk
into the runtime (I'd rebuild it if I have to) A VS.Net project we can
drop in would be killer.
> 3. Compiler construction and its cousins Lexing and Parsing are
> *hard*. If you think the ANTLR documentation is challenging, try
> reading Aho, Sethi, and Ullman.
Some day I will. I'm one of the few people I know of who look forwards
to the compilers class?
> There's a balance between setting people's expectations and scaring
> them away. On the other hand, I appreciate constructive conversations
> about helping people get started. (I got my start teaching software
> development courses and I'm still partial to the newcomers. :) )
thanks for putting up with us.
> We could probably use some examples in C# and other languages. (The
> bulk of the Wiki examples, including some very detailed tutorials, is
> in Java.)
>
that would help. Being able to run stuff is nice. But to a great extent
my problem wasn't language specific.
> Thanks for the feedback,
>
your welcome.
> ...Richard
>
>
>
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