[antlr-interest] Using ANTLR without Java

Gavin Lambert antlr at mirality.co.nz
Sat Jun 27 07:21:34 PDT 2009


At 17:48 27/06/2009, Elnur Cabarov wrote:
>I'm writing an application in C# and want to use ANTLR in it 
>(i.e. user should be able to write own grammars or change 
>existing ones, compile and run them dynamically)
>
>But I don't want end-users need both .Net framework and Java. Is 
>there any way to use ANTLR without Java? I don't mean using C# as 
>a target language. I mean dynamically compiling grammars and 
>running them without Java

Normally end-users wouldn't be writing grammars -- grammar writing 
is a complicated business. :)

For the common case, where you define a DSL or full language and 
the end-user simply composes programs (or other data) using that 
language, then Java is not needed by the end-user at all.  Neither 
the generated C# code nor the C# runtime require Java.

If you really are trying to let end-users compile grammars, and 
want a native solution, then you'll probably have to wait a 
while.  IIRC Sam Harwell (the C# target maintainer) has done some 
work towards porting the whole of ANTLR (including the compiler) 
to C#.  But it's still all pre-release.



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