[antlr-interest] Retaining comments

[David Holroyd]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 02:22:55PM -0700, Gerald B. Rosenberg wrote:
> There are times where you just need to randomly muck around in the 
> AST.  To use the AST interactively (to do user-driven refactorings in 
> my case), or where the selection conditions are context dependent, as 
> what sounds to be Stuart's case.  An AST wrapper is, I think, the 
> right approach.  The down-side is that it would be directly dependent 
> on the implementation/structure of the AST, requiring rewrite each 
> time the AST changed.
> 
> So, how to generate the implementation of a reasonably generic AST 
> random access/manipulation API?

I believe LPG (ANTLR competitor!) has some capability in this area,

  http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lpg/LPG_Automatic_AST_Generation.htm

Not that this on its own says much about problems like code refactoring,
but getting a heterogeneous AST for 'free' sounds nice.

LPG is used in the Eclipse 'IDE Meta-tooling Platform', about which I
know little,

  http://eclipse-imp.sourceforge.net/


ta,
dave

-- 
http://david.holroyd.me.uk/