[antlr-interest] What's coming for 2.8 (was Re: Build Questio n)

[mzukowski at bco.com]

> Additionally, "COPY" (duplicate 
> and insert duplicate into tree and "REUSE" (insert "as is"--usually 
> used as an optimization to avoid the overhead of AST node allocation) 
> are keywords which precede AST node descriptors.  

Wow, this means we won't always rebuild the entire tree when buildAST=true
is on?  Very nice for multi-pass translators.

Have you given any thought to emitting a tree back to source code?  Most of
the ignored elements of the parser grammar are things like ";".  Seems like
there might be a way to specialize your tree grammar generator into a tree
grammar emitter generator which would insert actions to output the ignored
tokens as the tree is walked.  Warnings if you are ignoring something like
ID which can't be reconstructed.  Between that and keeping a stack of output
tokens to push and pop inversely to the ^ operator in the parser would be
most of what you need.  The final thing would be an annotation for indenting
or dedenting (in the parser) which would be propagated to the tree emitter.

> #( ROOT! A B )
> led to the output tree
>	#( A B )
> rather than the A B list that might have been expected.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I would expect the list.  But I guess if I wanted the
tree I would do #( ROOT! A^ B), right?  I can see that the inverse (assuming
a tree) could be problematic.

Monty

 

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