[antlr-interest] ANTLR -vs- JB

[Jason]

Hello,

I've been tasked with writing a parser for a SQL like
query language.  Another team of developers in my
company has already written a c-language parser based
on the grammar using Flex/Bison.  I've obtained their
input files (.y and .l) and obviously it makes sense
for me to take advantage of them rather than trying to
independently construct the grammar.   My parser,
however, is to be implemented in Java.  

One of my co-workers found something called 'jb'
(http://www.cs.colorado.edu/serl/misc/jb.html) which
purports to convert the output of bison into a java
parser.  This seems like the ideal solution: all I
need to do is replace the C in the .y file I obtained
with Java and I'm all set.  A few questions:

1) Does anyone on the list have any experience with
jb.  The documentation seems pretty sketchy and I'm
not even sure that it's any longer maintained. 
Neither of these fills me with conifidence?

2) If I were to use ANTLR, of what use would the .y
and .l files be?  Would I need to manually translate
the files to syntax ANTLR understands?  I'd really
like to use ANTLR because of how well it's documented,
how actively it's maintained, and how helpful the user
community seems.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts anyone might have

-jason

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/