[antlr-interest] array list action attributes

Aaron Leiby aleiby.antlr at gmail.com
Sat Jan 8 12:37:24 PST 2011


I would prefer to handle the actions as suggested above, but in most cases I
need to know how many elements exist first.  So what I've been doing is
collecting them, getting the count, then processing them.

This is all in a tree walker grammar.  Is there an easy way to write out the
count in the lexer/parser grammar rewrite rules so it's available to the
tree walker without having to gather them first as I've been doing?

For example, I'd like to be able to do something like this (in the
lexer/parser grammar):

functionLiteral
: 'function' name=NameLiteral? args=parameters body=block
-> ^( FUNC $name? $args->count $args $body )
;

But the $args->count obviously won't work since the output tree is
homogenous.  I imagine there might be a way to create a dummy node with the
value as a payload, but I haven't tracked down the syntax for that yet.

Perhaps I'm still going about this the wrong way?

> the vector access functions are all documented in the API and there
> a copious examples if you read through the runtime source code.

Yep.  I was more hoping that there was higher level syntax in the ANTLR
language itself that could be used to autogenerate the API calls when
working with those vectors (making the grammar a bit more portable in the
process).  I was aware of the single element support (e.g. $arg.text), and
hoped I had simply missed the multi-value support.  Failing that, I was
familiar with the SCOPE macros that the C target provides for hiding some of
the data structure API details, and imagined similar macros had been created
for working with the += output that I had maybe missed.  It sounds like
neither of those are the case, so working directly with the API calls is the
correct/only path currently.

Thanks!

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Jim Idle <jimi at temporal-wave.com> wrote:

> The += syntax is really only used for tree rewriting, but the vector
> access functions are all documented in the API and there a copious
> examples if you read through the runtime source code.
>
> Unless you don't care too much about memory (memory for the STRINGs is not
> released until you free the parser), then I would just get the pointers
> from the token directly and copy whatever text you want from there.
>
> However, I think that your confusion here is that you are gathering a list
> then trying to process it afterwards, where I think you will find it more
> useful to do this (and note that you use + as otherwise if there are no
> IDs then it is just a TYPE alt):
>
> : TYPE // No IDs
> | ^(TYPE
>
>      (
>        i=ID { some code that does $i.whatever }
>      )+
>  )
>  { action code to finish up }
> ;
>
>
> Jim
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> > bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Leiby
> > Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2011 7:30 PM
> > To: antlr-interest
> > Subject: [antlr-interest] array list action attributes
> >
> > ANTLR3 allows labeling attributes for referencing in actions.
> >
> > Example:
> >
> > decl: type id=ID ';' { print "var" + $id.text; }
> >
> > With the C language target, the $id.text gets converted nicely into:
> >
> > (id->getText(id))
> >
> > However, if you have more than one attribute:
> >
> > decl: ^( TYPE ids+=ID* )
> >
> > ...$ids becomes a pANTLR3_VECTOR, and it appears those helpful
> > attributes no longer work?
> >
> > I was hoping something like $ids[i].text would get automatically
> > converted.
> >  Instead, I had to dig into the implementation a bit and hand-expand it
> > to:
> >
> > pANTLR_BASE_TREE id = (pANTLR_BASE_TREE)$ids->get($ids, i); const char*
> > name = (const char*)id->getText(id)->chars;
> >
> > So, I guess a couple questions:
> >
> > 1) Does the java language option suffer the same fate?  (i.e. ANTLR3
> > simply does not provide syntax for working with attributes on multi-
> > value labels?)
> > 2) Does the C API provide some nice macros I may have missed for making
> > this less gross?  (e.g. its set of SCOPE accessors)
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Aaron
> >
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