[antlr-interest] New user

[Jason Yip]

I am a new user as well. I started to read the doc a couple weeks ago. After a lot of searching on the net, I finally understood what the rules are which I didn't understand at first. I think the doc is not quite obvious as a person who had no knowledge on ANTLR.
I think the doc should include an appendix explaining what the rules are in details. What is a subrule, what does it do? Why do I need that? I don't know how much time I struggled to understand those basic things. 
Even though I can nearly find all the explainations on the website of ANTLR, but they are not "hyperlinked" together. Like what is LL(k), what does the function LA(1), LT(1) do??? They are all very hard for beginners and some appear in the FAQ, some appear in the resource, some appear in the documentation.
I think there can be more diagram helps to explain the concept. Well, but the flow diagrams explaining to the subrules are not quite clear to me until after I understood what the subrules mean. I think I was just didn't know so much international standard when I read the documentation.
Even though I can understand the subrules and the majority of the documentation, I still have many questions. I hope somebody could answer me.
1. I still don't understand what this mean and what it does:
   #sql_statement = #([SQL_STATEMENT, "sql_statement"], #sql_statement);
   What is it related to an imginary token? (I read the doc many times already)
2. What is the structure of an AST? I can hardly find literally specification on the Internet.
3. What is the different between a parser and a tree parser. I knew it is something about 2D and 1D. But what 2D does and why is it better than 1D? I couldn't find any clear diagram to explain it.
4. Is there any debugger so that I can trace how the grammar file?
5. When do I use syntatic predicate and semantic predicate? Why does this semantic make sense: ( set_clause ) => set_clause ??!!
6. What does match(_token) do? It matches what? Does it match the input stream? How come the tokens are Integers instead of String?
Sorry about many stupid questions. But those have been very hard for a starter like me. Thanks a lot!!
Jason
 Terence Parr 
wrote:
On Wednesday, August 28, 2002, at 06:56 AM, Matt Benson wrote:

> Okay, but I must say I'm disappointed that there's not
> some magic answer... ;)
>

Hi Matt,

Actually you probably want to see

Getting Started With ANTLR
http://www.antlr.org/fieldguide/start/index.html

and

All I know is that I need to build a parser or translator. Give me an 
overview of what ANTLR does and how I need to approach building things 
with ANTLR.
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=78

Do I need to make these more obvious? A lot of people have the same 
question but don't seem to see the Articles link more jguru FAQ. What 
can I do to make this more obvious? Perhaps more info in the 
distribution? Thanks for the feedback...

Terence




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