[antlr-interest] De-emphasizing tree grammars?

Jason Osgood jason at jasonosgood.com
Mon Dec 26 12:28:01 PST 2011


Hi Gavin.


> The issue I have with it is it's still nontypesafe. If I restructure my tree,
> no refactoring tool on Earth is going to be able to help me find all the
> broken path expressions.

Spot on. Refactoring would be sweet.

As I mentioned upthread, I've done A LOT of extract / transform / load (ETL).

The common solution for lack of type safety is some psychotic schema
specification like XSD.

Ever debug SOAP, WSDL, SAXON, XPath, XSL, etc? Indirection, lazy
loading, runtime proxies, contexts. It's terrible.

A lot of make-work just to cut a string out of a database and paste it
into another database or web page.

So I wrote my own DOM and XPath. My composite objects always render
themselves. So debugging within Eclipse is trivial. For example,
Node.toString() renders that node's subtree.

So, yes, my ANTLR specific path expressions get broken as my grammar
morphs. While it's not pretty, it is manageable. Until an awesome new
language adds paths as first class objects.


Cheers, Jason


PS- Sorry for repost. I'm receiving the digest, making replying a pain.


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