[antlr-interest] A postmortem of my use of antler

[Benjamin Shropshire]

Terence Parr wrote:
>
> On Mar 11, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Andy Tripp wrote:
>
>> Gerald B. Rosenberg wrote:
>>> And, design in Antlr is largely a function of the language to be 
>>> recognized.  If you look at the archived grammars, what at first 
>>> appears to be wildly varying styles is more a consequence of design 
>>> choices tailored to the intended function of the grammars.
>>>
>> Here: 
>> http://www.antlr.org/pipermail/antlr-interest/2004-October/009742.html 
>>
>> I compare the two ASTs built by two people for the same language 
>> (Java 1.5), and the
>> ASTs have some differences. There's no particular reason for the 
>> differences (it's not like one person
>> needed the AST to look one way, and the other another way).
>>
>> Again, my point is that it would be nice to have ANTLR by default 
>> build a reasonable AST without
>> any explicit AST-building syntax ("^" and "!") in the grammar.
>
> how could ANTLR *possibly* know the structure of the AST to build 
> except for, perhaps, expressions? parse tree, yes. AST, no.
>
> Ter
>
>
That /is/ to much to expect.