[antlr-interest] Antlr Studio Video

[Brian Smith]

Prashant,

I think that your demo is really interesting and I wouldn't let the
people complaining about the dashed boxes get to you. If you change
the color of the dashed lines to black or something else that is dark
then I think you will solve the sole technical issue that was raised
about your decision. Syntax diagramming is not even the make-or-break
feature for an IDE for tools like ANTLR anyway. If I had to make a
wishlist of IDE features for ANTLR, in order of importance, it would
look like this:

* Support for disambiguating ambiguous grammars. In particular, the
tool should show me which parts of the grammar are ambiguous, WHY they
are ambiguous, and offer ways to fix the ambiguities.
* Ability to (semi-)automatically convert grammars written using other
systems (e.g. JavaCC, Flex/Bison, SDF, BNF converter) to ANTLR. Most
computer languages already have a grammar of some kind, but the set of
computer languages with ANTLR grammars is much smaller.
* Support for testing grammars. E.g., generating test cases, run test
cases automatically, provide testing coverage reports. In particular,
the tool should be able to generate a bunch of strings that are
matched by the grammar, and let you selectively add those strings as
test cases.
* Support for interactive development of grammars. I.e., making the
code-compile-test cycle as fast as possible.
* Ability to keep grammars and tests in sync. For example, if you have
seperate a seperate parser and tree parser(s), when you change the
parser, the IDE should help remind you to change the tree parser(s)
and the test cases.
* Syntax highlighting and code folding.
* Code completion, both inside the ANTLR productions and inside the
(Java/C#/etc.) actions.

I think that if your tool provides even half of the above features,
then your users are going to be a lot more productive than they were
without the tool. And productivity, not diagram prettiness, is what
matters. And, anyway, unless the dashed boxes start causing users of
your software to die off or something, it is something that can be
changed in the future at your discretion.

- Brian


On 6/2/05, Prashant Deva <prashant.deva at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, i have put up a video showing a proper demo of the syntax diagram view.
> Get it at -
> http://antlrstudio.com/demo1.wmv
> 
> PRASHANT
>