[antlr-interest] Re: ACE C preprocessor by Gosling

[lgcraymer]

--- In antlr-interest at y..., Bogdan Mitu <bogdan_mt at y...> wrote:
> 
> --- Terence Parr <parrt at j...> wrote:
> > Cool.  There should be lots of work for all...Loring is talking 
about an 
> > editor that highlights ambiguities etc... ;)
> 
> Here I might be able to help. I already have an editor with syntax 
highlight
> for ANTLR, an improved Ant task, and kind of "unit test" framework 
for ANTLR
> grammars. If someone needs them, just let me know.

That would help.  What I've actually been thinking about is an 
interactive development environment for ANTLR with
    1.)  Rule database.  This would make it easier to reuse pieces of 
grammars.
    2.)  Refactoring support.  This would include ordering 
alternatives to minimize "k" within a rule, computation of minimal 
syntactic predicates, etc.
    3.)  Tree grammar generation and storage of rewrites:  the idea is 
that you generate a tree grammar from a predecessor parse or tree 
grammar, and refactor the generated grammar.  After the predecessor 
grammar is changed, a new version of the tree grammar is generated and 
the refactorings applied automatically.
    4.)  Interactive grammar analysis and editing support for a 
multi-grammar chain (lexer, parser, multiple tree grammars).
    5.)  Output "grammar" support.  This is the last painful part of 
building ANTLR translators.
    6.)  Full LL(k) analysis and predicate hoisting (just to point out 
that John Mitchell has the right idea here).
    7.)  Testing support.
    8.)  Whatever else makes sense.  You mentioned reverse translation 
support in a previous post; that might be possible via adding 
"comments" on deleted nodes (! is not reversible otherwise) and 
figuring out how to generate an ANTLR grammar as output--I suspect 
that that would not be too difficult.

Except for the output grammar stuff (Ter's working on that), most of 
this is either an extension of the current ANTLR engine or borrows 
from other efforts.  My guess is that this would drastically reduce 
turnaround for developing a language translator.  I suspect that such 
an environment would make development of domain specific languages 
into ordinary programming practice.

--Loring

> 
> Bogdan 
> 
> > Ter



 

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