[antlr-interest] Auto- completion feature based on ANTLR

[Terence Parr]

On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 03:24  AM, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:

> on 8/19/03 1:48, Terence Parr at parrt at cs.usfca.edu wrote:
>> Nope...i'm just working on the engine (throwaway prototype) at the
>> moment, but this has led me to believe I can do all sorts of fancy
>> tricks later if I simply serialize the grammar/lookahead info (like -g
>> option) into the output parser so it's available.  The degenerate case
>> might be that I don't generate the parser, just the grammar/lookahead
>> info and then you can intepret it. :)
>
> Hi Terr,
>
> Sounds cool.
>
> When you think we will be able start to use this ?

Hi Ruslan,

Well, I'm working like mad on it, but school starts on Monday and so I 
won't have nearly as much time to work on it.  However, I'm hoping that 
by the end of the semester a student will have used my engine to build 
a small prototype workbench for grammars.  Just an experimental thing 
to see what the issues are.  Later we can try to build something to 
integrate into various IDEs.  Anyway, I have mostly finished the parser 
grammar analysis, but am working on a shockingly cool new concept to 
improve the power of ANTLR's parsers that as a side-effect makes the 
lexers much faster and much easier to write while maintaining their 
current power!  yeeeeeehaaaaa!

So, expect to see not a tool, but an analysis engine for ANTLR grammars 
some time this semester.  I'm not sure I'll release it before I have 
tool though, that's the problem.  You see somebody with more time might 
take my engine (the hard part) and build a tool that is out before 
ANTLR 3 can go thru the programmer review process and construction 
process.  I'm telling you folks that this new engine is the most 
obvious and beautiful piece of software imaginable.  The entire LL(k) 
lookahead computation (for full lookahead and ignoring efficiency) is 
one method of about 1.5 pages of code!  It's all in the data structure, 
baby!!!  There is then another few methods for approx lookaehad and 
determinism checking, but this code is clean as hell!  No more 
protection from competition by having opaque code ;)  Heck I even have 
spent days building test harnesses and tests so that I know this sucker 
works :)

Terence
--
Professor Comp. Sci., University of San Francisco
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
Co-founder, http://www.jguru.com
Co-founder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!
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