[antlr-interest] "Language design patterns" book available in beta

Steve Cooper steve at stevecooper.org
Sat Jun 6 01:43:48 PDT 2009


> On Jun 5, 2009, at 3:36 PM, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> Simple languages (such as typical DSLs) are simple to parse and
> process.

2009/6/6 Terence Parr <parrt at cs.usfca.edu>:
> Yeah, stuff like configuration files are pretty easy.

I suspect I may be the idiot in the room, here ;) My suspicion is that
most people here are fairly good at this stuff, and most jobbing
programmers are not.

I'm coming at this as a relative beginner in the world of parsing.
I've just got into ANTLR and languages in general because I've found
myself doing simple language-interpretation tasks at work, and wanting
to structure them better than a big mess of regex and custom code.

So for me, I'm looking to understand what to do next when I realise my
big config file is actually a small DSL, or how I should write a
simple code generator. What I've read so far of the book is great for
that. If I were tempted to write a general-purpose programming
language, I'd follow Design Pattern 99: Stop it and embed a Python
interpreter. ;)

The subtitles of Ter's two books speaks to a focus on smaller tasks,
too; 'Building DSLs' and 'Techniques for implementing DSLs'

Anyway, this is just where I am in my learning.

    Steve


More information about the antlr-interest mailing list