[antlr-interest] Ruby Target ?

Stephen Gaito stephen at perceptisys.co.uk
Sun Sep 16 09:26:18 PDT 2012


Martin,

I would /love/ to use/test a ANTLR 3.4 Ruby target, but alas at the 
moment I do not have the bandwidth to /do/ or even /fix/ the Ruby target.

One of the target platforms for my particular ANTLR3 grammar's use will 
be Ruby, however I have decided to make a Ruby 1.9 C code extension 
library using Jim Idle's C generator.  (Principally because my /main/ 
platform will be a C code PHP extension library for use on webservers).

 From my very brief dive into the C target's StringTemplates (looking 
for phase differences between the official download and the gitHub 
versions), I can say that the inter-relations between the templates may 
be a bit confusing at first.

To echo Eric, you /will/ understand Antlr3 a whole lot better when you 
have "finished".

I suspect most ports are based upon the collection of StringTemplates 
which generate the Java version and then tweaked as needed.

Regards,

Stephen Gaito

On 16/09/12 13:51, Martin Van Aken wrote:
> Terrence/list,
> I've the same question about the Ruby target. For what I can see from
> github : https://github.com/antlr/antlr3/tree/master/runtime/Ruby it has
> not move since two years so it is probably lagging behind. Do anyone is
> still maintaining it ?
>
> If not, I may be interested in trying to update it myself. Any resource for
> (would be) goal maintener that I could start with ? Anyone that would be
> interested to contribute (time, advice, test, anything). I may take a look
> at the python target (that seems to be keeping up well) as a reference
> (closer to Ruby than Java).
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Martin
>
> On 16 September 2012 09:44, Kieran Simpson <kierans777 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ter/list,
>>     Thanks again for all your efforts.  In terms of other language
>> targets is there an idea/outline of when they'll be available.  I'm
>> specifically thinking of the C target.  In a list thread from January
>> there was the indication that a C++ target was still a while away so any
>> progress updates?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>> On 16/09/12 4:36 AM, Terence Parr wrote:
>>> Howdy folks,
>>>
>>> ANTLR v4 release is rapidly approaching. The beta of the reference book
>> will be out next week and the remaining two or three chapters should appear
>> within a month or so afterwards. Sam Harwell and I have been working very
>> hard on the tool itself and we should have 4.0 ready by the time the book
>> goes final. In the meantime, 4.0b1 will be available for use with the beta
>> book. Oh, and we need to release 3.4.1 before 4.0.
>>> I have paid for a new website design for both ANTLR and StringTemplate,
>> which looks great. We will continue to use the same wiki software for
>> documentation. The current website is generated by a Java server I built
>> whereas the new one is going to be static so I have less software to
>> maintain. In other words,  rather than using some kind of include mechanism
>> to get the general look and feel on each page, the new websites will be
>> simply static files on the disk.  The current antlr.org content will
>> become antlr3.org, leaving the current domain pointing at v4 content.
>>> We currently have functionality on the websites to accept new grammars
>> and filesharing and articles and so on. Because this is so infrequent, I
>> think it's reasonable to simply have an HTML form that has an email action
>> instead of an HTTP POST. When I get those requests, I can simply add them
>> to the file on the server. (will that use the user's local mail client or
>> will it force people to set up mail in their actual browsers before it will
>> email me? does anybody know?)
>>> On to the grammar repository. Because it's likely we'll want to make
>> fixes / updates to existing grammars, I don't think a simple form / email
>> mechanism is the best solution. Right now, I have to go in and overwrite /
>> update a number of files for a grammar update. Naturally, this screams for
>> a revision control solution. I was thinking that we might as well just use
>> github for this so that anybody can add or modify the publicly available
>> grammars.
>>> There are a number of issues with using github for this. First, I would
>> not want to create a new repository for each grammar so we would have one
>> repository holding all grammars. This is pretty coarse granularity.  On the
>> other hand, if you just want one grammar, you can download individually
>> from github. The second issue is that we would really have to have a single
>> license for all grammars in the repository. I would hate for a GPL grammar
>> to get its stank on the other grammars. It would confuse people to have
>> multiple licenses within a single repository. Thirdly, not everyone is
>> comfortable with assembly language…er…I mean git. In that case, people
>> could simply mail me a grammar for inclusion. It would only take me a
>> second to add it. The fourth problem. We need a clean URI for grammars and
>> I propose:
>>> http://www.antlr.org/grammars/<name>
>>>
>>> for the root directory of that project. For example,
>>>
>>> http://www.antlr.org/grammars/java
>>>
>>> would point out a directory that contains Java.g4 and may be a test
>> program or something.
>>> I could easily add a redirect in the tomcat configuration files,
>> assuming I can stomach all of that filthy XML, but that does not scale very
>> well when people add grammars. Instead, perhaps the best solution is to set
>> up a cronjob that pulls from the grammar repository and leaves the grammars
>> on antlr.org's disk so that /grammars URI points at that directory. That
>> way, the URIs would always be up-to-date with the repository and without me
>> having to do any work. Heh, that just might work.
>> http://www.antlr.org/grammars by itself could redirect to the github
>> project.
>>> Anyway, If you have any thoughts on this stuff, please reply.
>>>
>>> Terence
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