[antlr-interest] Why no links to ANTLR 3.0 on www.antlr.org??

Terence Parr parrt at cs.usfca.edu
Fri Jun 3 12:14:28 PDT 2005


On Jun 3, 2005, at 12:53 AM, Geir Ove Skjaervik wrote:

>
>
> Maybe its me, but I cannot find anything about the new relese on
> www.antlr.org, nor can I find anythign about the licensing policy of
> this new release? Why is this so??

Hi.  Thanks for the feedback.  The not-yet-released ANTLR v3 will be  
under the BSD license.  An early access release was announced on the  
mailing list, but very specifically not announced on the home page  
because only experience ANTLR developers should play with it.  I  
decided it was best only to announce on the mailing list.

> I am currently using 2.7.5, but find it hard to track what is going on
> in the ANTLR community.
>
> Yes, we have this news group, but a news group is a very inefficient
> when it comes to finding information you (I, we) need in a hurry:
> Searching for a keyword more often than not gives matched to another
> person who asks the same question or someone who thinks they know the
> answer.

This is true.  Normally I announce things on the news list, but as  
you see from the above, I decided against it this time.

> Speaking in general terms, most of the ANTLR site seems to be for the
> "inner circle" only: It is very hard to find information about ANTLR.

It was designed very carefully.  The top is for people deciding about  
ANTLR: what is it?  What do people say about it?  Who uses it?

Below that is for people using it: doc, news, grammars, file sharing,  
articles.

> The getting started examples are too basic to do any real stuff,  
> and the
> provided examples are also either to simple, or way over a beginners
> head.

That is probably true.  Have you seen my course materials?  They may  
go into more detail.

I suspect that my upcoming "Using ANTLR in the wild" book (starting  
on it this Fall) will serve you nicely.

> I am over the beginner level know (I think and hope), but getting  
> there
> was very time-consuming: And, isn't a tool like this about saving  
> time?

Why was it time consuming to get through the beginning level?  I'll  
need this info when I write the book.  Is it because language tools  
are just different from normal programming or does the tool suck?   
Does the intro doc suck?

> I have learned the tool the hard way, but is the way "we" want this to
> be?

No.  I want it to be easy.  I"ll be doing the book and ANTLRWorks  
will help a lot.  Actually 3.0 itself will make life much easier.   
Part of the problem with ANTLR 2 is that it is quirky as hell!

> By the way: ANTLR IS great, but I wish it could be more "approachable"
> :-)

Me too!  Hopefully with more feedback from people, it will get easier  
and easier.

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



More information about the antlr-interest mailing list