[antlr-interest] C generator is not generating @after actions

[Gavin Lambert]

At 05:05 7/02/2009, Jim Idle wrote:
 >All my experience tells me that I will be answering "How do I
 >make this go faster forever though". It is better require a
 >request for debug 'style' information/instrumentation, in
 >the way the C compilers do.

That's what FAQs are for :)  (You're going to get this sort of 
question either way -- and "how do I make it faster" is an easier 
question to answer than "why does this mysteriously fail on 
certain input".)

Possibly though we're just coming at this from different 
perspectives.  Performance has never really been a big issue for 
me, as most of the ANTLR grammars I've created have been used 
either in hobby projects where I didn't really care about the time 
required (even though these probably ended up having the largest 
amount of input pumped through them at a time) or as DSL compilers 
for professional projects where the overall non-ANTLR compile-time 
was in the minutes anyway so a few more seconds here or there 
didn't really make much difference.

Getting the grammars robust, though, was at times quite 
un-obvious, especially when I was first starting out.

 >#define ANTLR3_SANITY_CHECK
 >
 >But otherwise that would do it assuming that I wanted to add 
lots
 >of #ifdefs. It is however easy to extend the debug option,
 >assuming that Ter believes the idea is a worthwhile one.

I still think the default should be to sanity check.  (Similar to 
how most people work on their projects in "debug mode" and only 
switch to "release mode" for final testing and release.)  And this 
is quite a different idea than ANTLR's current debug mode.

You also wouldn't need all that many #ifdefs -- just one or two at 
the top of the file where you create a bunch of macros that either 
compile to sanity-checking code or to nothing.  It's a pity you 
can't rely on being compiled with gcc, though, since that compiler 
has extensions that make doing this sort of thing much easier :)