[antlr-interest] Re: Match until "<@"

Terence Parr parrt at jguru.com
Mon May 13 10:32:58 PDT 2002


On Sunday, May 12, 2002, at 04:26  PM, praveen_c wrote:

> Terence,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> In your previous mail you mentioned that this kind of problem is
> hard for a lexer. Suppose I have tokens T1, T2 and T3 that my
> lexer can recognize. I want all the REMAINING text that is not part
> of T1, T2 and T3 to be another token T4( assume that T1, T2 and T3
> can occur in any order ). Is there an easy way to specify this in
> the grammar? I think I can come up with a long semantic predicate
> that is negation of T1, T2 and T3. But like you said that doesn't
> sound very clean.

Hmm...seems like maybe your grammar, (T1|T2|T3), would have an action 
after that switched the lexer to see the T4 lexer...Hmm...is it a 
sequence of T1..T3?  If so that is harder...you will need a trigger in 
your lexer or parser somehow to know when to switch.  Typically the 
language is the problem when you can't figure out what the "trigger" 
is.  I.e., your language is highly context sensitive or something.

> So here is my question, is this a limitation of Parser Generators?
> or is this specific to antlr. Am I better off using another Parser
> Generator like JavaCC?

As I say, you might take a look at the language spec.  Is this something 
that you folks wrote?  Can you change it?

> Before somebody flames at my post, please note that I'm just
> learning
> about Parser Generators and I donot have a CS degree.

No flame wars here. :)  We are a cuddly sort of mailing list :) ;)

Ter


 

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