[antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 2 (for ANTLR v4)

[Wujek Srujek]

I am new to ANTLR3 and haven't yet got a lot of experience with it. The one
thing that is bugging me, though, is how hard it was to make sure ANTLR
doesn't perform any recovery and fails on first error with checked
exceptions. And it involved a nasty trick with sneaky throwing... I would
love to see it made easier.

wujek

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 9:59 AM, Luke Tucker <luke_tucker at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> One thing I would like to see improved is the undo/redo functionality in
> ANTLRworks. At the moment is just works character by character and there is
> not much intelligence behind it. At the moment, if for example I delete a
> rule and replace it with a new one and include a couple of sentences as
> comments, to undo this operation I have to ctrl-z for every character I
> typed as a comment and more often than not, this ends up exceeding the
> default 50x undo history and I loose my changes. If you compare this to
> something like Eclipse, it would treat the whole comment block as a single
> undo, which makes life a lot easier.
>
> Luke
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Terence Parr <parrt at cs.usfca.edu>
> To: antlr-interest Interest <antlr-interest at antlr.org>
> Cc: Colin Bean <cbean at cs.usfca.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, 1 September 2011, 20:18
> Subject: [antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 2 (for ANTLR v4)
>
> Hi, In parallel with the development of ANTLR v4, superstar Colin Bean will
> be building the new version of ANTLRWorks. We already have a great base in
> what Jean Bovet did for the 1st version. It's a known entity and has lots of
> bookkeeping code that we can cut and paste into the new one such as the
> automatic update facility and preferences. Because we've got something to
> play with, we have something to critique and also a basic target.
>
> I can imagine the basic tool being missing but it would be great to get
> feedback from the antlr community.  Remember, that there are probably 2 main
> communities: the people new to languages and/or ANTLR and the people very
> used to working with ANTLR grammars. For example, new people tend to like
> the syntax diagrams but many old-timers like myself prefer looking at the
> grammar because it's more terse.  Recognizing that we must serve both those
> communities, please comment with any thoughts on the following:
>
> * What feature seemed like a good idea, but didn't end up being that
> valuable? You can say even heretical things like: " the single step feature
> in the debugger just didn't seem to be that useful beyond learning about
> parsing"
>
> * Do you use the re-factoring? Keep in mind that v4 will automatically
> handle direct left recursion.
>
> * What features do you think are really critical to add?
>
> * What features could be really great if we improved them?
>
> * Do we need better export facilities?   would you really use things like
> "export grammar as hyperlinked HTML", for example.
>
> * What parts of the debugger did you use? There is a lot of stuff in there
> like: breakpoints on input tokens, step forward, step backward, jump to the
> end, break on specific kinds of events, break at specific line in the
> grammar, show the parse tree, show the AST constructed, list to the incoming
> events, etc...  Should we rethink the entire notion of the debugger at
> something that simply displays information about what it sees during the
> parse?  I.e., doesn't need to be a controller in the sense that you can
> single step the actual running parser over the usual socket connection?
>
> You might include whether you are in the newbie or experienced camp or
> somewhere in between.
>
> Udo Borkowski has already implemented a fantastic tree layout algorithm
> from an academic paper. The performance is extremely good and the results
> are tight.  Colin will probably implement his own syntax diagram viewer so
> that we can make it more than just a pretty picture. We want to highlight
> elements and step through etc.
>
> Thanks!
> Ter
>
> List: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/listinfo/antlr-interest
> Unsubscribe:
> http://www.antlr.org/mailman/options/antlr-interest/your-email-address
>
> List: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/listinfo/antlr-interest
> Unsubscribe:
> http://www.antlr.org/mailman/options/antlr-interest/your-email-address
>