[antlr-interest] v3: How could I construct a parser for an "active" language such as ASP.Net, PHP or (in my case) Active RTF?

[Eric]

Just my thoughts or thinking out loud on this.

I played around with RTF a few years ago because I wanted to make an
editor/diff tool that could add tags to change the properties of the text,
i.e. color, underlining, etc., something like HTML. If I remember
correctly, one of the interesting aspects of RTF was that it was designed
to be read and processed sequentially in one pass. If the tags were done
correctly, you could start at a marked boundary and continue processing,
even in the middle of the stream. This was highly advantageous when working
with long documents of hundreds of pages or more.

>From the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification Version 1.9.1

"A sample RTF parsing reader program is given in Appendix A: Sample RTF
Reader Application. This sample RTF reader is designed for use in
conjunction with this document to assist those interested in developing
their own RTF readers. The sample RTF reader is not a for-sale product, and
Microsoft does not provide technical support or any other kind of support
for the sample RTF parsing reader code or this document. "

I would seriously read the RTF specs first and truly understand how RTF
works before using ANTLR with it. You may be walking through a door you
wish you never opened.

Do not take this as implying ANTLR is terrible. It is merely that you
should use the right tool for the right job and here ANTLR is not the right
tool, the tool you need is outlined in the RTF spec.