[antlr-interest] postmortem

[Darien Hager]

On 3/13/08, Gavin Lambert <antlr at mirality.co.nz> wrote:
>
> I had a fairly trivial DSL to parse and I wanted to throw it into a
> codegen routine afterwards.  I noticed that there was this "AST" option that
> said it would output a tree, which I thought would be useful.  So I switched
> it on, and was puzzled that I didn't get a tree out of it.  (I was basically
> expecting that by default every time I called a subrule it would drop a
> level down in the tree.)
>

I had the same experience. However, the architectual impliciations
behind action code creeped me out even more, so I kept looking :P


> However I can see the other side of this too.  If ANTLR did default to
> dropping a tree level for each subrule call, how would you go ahout telling
> it to not do that?
>

Could this be a tool-level solution? Parse the grammar
file, and automatically insert basic AST-rewrite rules to achieve the
same effect? The benefit of this is that it involves no additional
magic on ANTLR's part, and would be easier to customize if it turns
out that the grammar rules are best arranged in one way but the AST is best
arranged in another.


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

http://www.etelos.com
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