[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3.0ea2 and ANTLRWorks 1.0ea2 released!

[Terence Parr]

On Jun 13, 2005, at 9:00 AM, Jim Idle wrote:
> I have worked out why the color coding seems to be broken: a  
> careful examination of how it breaks, and a sip of Bridgeport IPA,  
> showed that it is out by 1 character position for each line. This  
> is because it is only parsing correctly when the newline sequence  
> is the UNIX \n only (and, I imagine, the MAC \r). Files that came  
> from some Windows editor will usually have \r\n and the syntax  
> highlighting (and the editor pane in general) are not dealing with  
> this.

Good catch!!!  yeah :)
>  Personally, I found my use of the tool to be greatly enhanced once  
> this worked properly. The only thing I could do with now is a bit  
> more documentation on what is syntactically different in this pre- 
> release. Once I found the 3.0 demo stuff I made strides forward.  
> Though it is pretty reasonable to expect that if you are using the  
> pre-release you will have to wing it a bit.

Yeah, sorry about that...i'm scrambling to finish up the damn thing.   
The examples do help, right?
>  My only fear (hoping not to start a religious war) is that  
> graphical tools built in Java always seem to crash, hang, have slow  
> GUIs and so on (at least on windows, and though it would be easy to  
> blame Windows, I don’t think that is the issue). At the moment this  
> tool suffers form the same issues – though I am loathe to offer any  
> judgment at this stage in the game – I would prefer to contribute  
> to its betterment.

Java guis are indeed slow, but portable...sort of. ;)  As for  
crashing and hanging, I find this tool not too bad for early access  
release :)
>  I very much like the syntax diagrams, though I have not decided if  
> they are just a cool gimmick for the programmer or not yet.
They are like the "dashboard" on Mac OS X Tiger...cool, but not  
always useful to experienced developers.  OTOH, they are REALLY great  
for tracking down ambiguities...for this, they are really spectacular :)
> They certainly will aid in documentation enormously. Perhaps we  
> could have a mode that could export all the syntax diagrams at once  
> (sorry if it is there and I missed it)?

Use -nfa or -dfa to get something like that from antlr itself.  I  
think Jean will have something to print / generate PDF for these  
puppies out later.
>  Some suggestions (not criticisms):
>
>  I would suggest that errors from parsing the grammar appear by  
> “check grammar”, or “Build”, in their own pane, instead of the Java  
> console, and be able to double click them to locate the error in  
> the source code.
> Don’t prompt for output locations all the time, but allow a change  
> of ‘properties’ if the programmer wants to change the output  
> location after the first run.
>
>
> In light of the above, perhaps have a project file that hold such  
> things. Borrowing from some of the good things in like Visual  
> Studio .Net 2003 (err, I mean the freeware tools such as Eclipse),  
> is not a bad idea. I realize of course that there was quite an  
> effort to get to this point first and such things tend to get  
> filled in afterwards.

Thanks a lot for the feedback!  Good stuff.

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