[antlr-interest] StringTemplate 2.1 release!

Terence Parr parrt at cs.usfca.edu
Tue Jan 25 11:11:23 PST 2005


On Jan 25, 2005, at 10:11 AM, Rodrigo B. de Oliveira wrote:
> Hi Ter,
>
> Please consider the idea of releasing an early version without any
> tree support at all. I'd love to migrate the boo parser to 3.0 and get
> the performance boost :)
>
> 3.0 would also make it more feasible to have the boo parser written in
> boo, something I'd love to have just for the fun of it.
>
> Please, please, please. :)

Hi Rodrigo,

Don't worry...soon it will be "put up or shut up" time. ;)  Meaning, I 
have bragged about this 3.0 for long enough that pretty soon I'll have 
to show something. ;) hahahahaha!

The problem is that the tool is still in "look at what I'm working on 
in my garage" mode, which means that any bad input makes it crash.  
There are no error messages for bad semantics; well, not enough.  
Further, the overall performance will not amaze you at this point.  I'm 
generating a horribly inefficient list of IFs instead of switches for 
DFAs etc...  Still the general overhead is low enough that w/o 
optimization I'm a wee bit faster than 2.x parsers, naturally depending 
heavily on the grammar.  Oh, and no documentation at all so far.  As 
Fred Brooks says in his Mythical Man Month, slapping some code together 
is about 1/3 of a product. ;)

My plan is to:

1. make 3.0 enforce syntax / semantics for existing functionality
2. do a refactoring / grooming / clean up pass
3. write up my tree construction / tree walking proposal
4. get feedback to tree stuff and then implement
5. early release with a few examples and my "blogs" as doc

I *hope* that I'll have a light load this semester, which is seems to 
be the case.  I'll tentatively say that May is a good early release 
time with or without the completed tree stuff.

BTW, integrating StringTemplate for rewrite rules seems to be a simple 
extension of my tree rewrite stuff; might make it in as well.  Look for 
my article on ANTLR+StringTemplate coming soon to a theatre near you.

Sometime in the next 9 months you'll see a GUI built by Jean Bovet, a 
graduate student here at USF. :)

Ter
--
CS Professor & Grad Director, University of San Francisco
Creator, ANTLR Parser Generator, http://www.antlr.org
Cofounder, http://www.jguru.com
Cofounder, http://www.knowspam.net enjoy email again!



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