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

[Darien Hager]

Andy: I agree. Perhaps examples involving embedding application code into a
grammar should be introduced after all of the basics for creating an AST.
This de-emphasizes knowing the inner workings of the code generation, and is
less threatening to new users (e.g. those with no language-parsing
experience beyond simple regular expressions.)


The reason I say "less threatening" is because--perceptually--it provides
better encapsulation. While it doesn't show off all that ANTLR can do, it
provides a nice understandable set of boundaries to start learning with:
"Text goes in, tree structure comes out". Leading off with "Here is how
basically your entire calculator program is implemented in ANTLR" is a
comparatively creepy example. It triggers instinctual fear of lock-in and
needing weirdly re-implement existing code inside a grammar file.

-- 
Darien Hager
Developer
Etelos, Inc.
darien at etelos.com

http://www.etelos.com
"Revolutionizing the way applications are developed, distributed and
consumed."

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