[antlr-interest] C# Target Poll

[Gavin Lambert]

At 11:27 17/05/2008, Johannes Luber wrote:
 >My motivation to consider C5 is simply that I prefer to use
 >state-of-the-art tools, and to a certain extent .NET falls 
short. I
 >have used it in a few projects so far and will use it again. It 
is
 >easy to use. I had no problems besides non-binary-serializing of 
a
 >dictionary, which was caused by .NET bugs, so I wouldn't hold 
that
 >against C5. Also, serializing seems to be an unusual need for
 >compilers anyway and can be circumvented by own designs anyway, 
as
 >it probably would have been anyway. Please correct if I'm wrong 
and
 >C5 would prevent doing from something what you can do now.

What direct improvement/extra features does it provide (for the 
purposes of the ANTLR runtime) that the standard .NET classes do 
not?  What is the advantage in using it, given the penalty of 
adding an additional assembly?

Bear in mind that the CSharp target can't use it anyway (as that's 
still v1-compatible), so by using it you'd create a much larger 
difference between CSharp and CSharp2.  And probably add to the 
maintenance cost.

(Also, you've referred to ANTLR-generated parsers as 'compilers' 
at least twice now.  While that's indeed a common usage, they're 
also used to parse data structures, so they're not *always* 
'compilers'.  Doesn't make much difference to the serialisation 
case, except that it's possible someone might want to serialise an 
AST.  It's probably more likely they'll serialise something else 
generated from the AST/parse, but you never know.)