[antlr-interest] FW: Re: antlr vs. sableCC comparison
dm at cs.yorku.ca
dm at cs.yorku.ca
Sat May 24 16:46:36 PDT 2003
>>>
>>>My reaction to SableCC has always been, "Why?", and the answer
>>>always seems to be "it was a good excuse for Gagnon to have fun
>>>writing a master's thesis". It has less functionality than either
>>>ANTLR or JavaCC and was introduced after both were available. The
>>>basic features of SableCC are
>>>1.) DFA lexing
>>>2.) LALR(1) parsing
>>>3.) Visitor-based tree walkers.
>>>and the package made no real additions to the state-of-the-art, as
>>>far as I can tell.
>>
>>There are four important missing features above (for SableCC 2.x):
>>4) Strictly-typed heterogeneous AST
>>5) Name-based access to children node (intead of error-prone
>> index-based access)
>>6) Complete separation of users written code and generated code,
>> allowing direct debugging of user written code, and a shorter
>> development cycle for compilers and interpreters.
>>7) Overall very intuitive syntax and overall framework.
>>
>>These four last point were at the heart of my M.Sc. thesis. DFA, LALR(1)
>>and visitors were only the base tools I used to illustrate these concepts.
>>
>>Of course, upcoming SableCC versions will add many additional features.
>>For example, SableCC 3.0.0 brings a innovative mechanism to intuitively
>>specify concrete syntax tree (CST) to abstract syntax tree (AST)
>>parse-time transformations in the grammar. This mechanism goes well
>>beyond "getting rid of unneeded tokens", and is subject to full semantic
>>verifications (so, there's no way to specify invalid transformations).
>>The mechanism is deterministic; it does not depend on "pattern matching"
>>(whose result could vary depending on the pattern search order).
>>>Predicated LL(k) (ANTLR) parsing can handle any context-free
>>>grammar,
>>This is a misleading statement. I will not enter this debate. Either
>>the poster is clueless, either he simply wants to provoke a flamewar.
>>
>>Please note my use of the word "misleading", and not "false". The
>>problem has to do with the meaning of "can handle".
>>>ANTLR's tree grammar approach is more powerful than the visitor
>>>approach. In fact, a visitor can be expressed as a special ANTLR
>>>tree (I've not tested this code, but it should work):
>>I have great admiration for Terrence Parr's Ph.D. research and his
>>ANTLR software. I will not get into arguments about which software
>>is better. SableCC and ANTLR have both some advantages over the
>>other. You simply need to pick the right tool for a given task.
>>
>>Etienne
>>
>>--
>>Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D. http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
>>SableVM: http://www.sablevm.org/
>>SableCC: http://www.sablecc.org/
>>
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--
Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D. http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM: http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC: http://www.sablecc.org/
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