[antlr-interest] Anyone in the whole world doing multi step tree transformation?

[Oliver Zeigermann]

Folks!

I was just wondering if anyone except me is actually doing tree
transformations using ANTLR. I use the tree transformation feature
introduced in 3.1. While this does work well, it is so very hard to
refactor or extend my tree structures as I have to change all my
transformer stages and have no tool support to find out what to change
and where.

I started using heterogenous tokens with normalized children to make
use of compiler type checking which helps, but does not comletely
solve my issues as I still have an unchecked children list - which I
need to traverse the tree using tree walkes.

I was considering skipping the whole grammar driving tree
transformation step, but what should I replace it with?

I know of the xtext approach that uses non normalized heterogenous
tokens generated from a common model shared by all transformation
parts. Which seems like a good idea, however, does not seem to have a
means powerful enough to do serious tree transformation.

Any experiences? Hints?

Thanks in advance

- Oliver