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

[Jim Idle]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-
> bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Terence Parr
> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 11:35 AM
> On Jun 13, 2005, at 9:00 AM, Jim Idle wrote:
> >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 :)

No problem - glad to offer any help that I can, even a simple one like
that.

> > 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?

Yes, indeed they do. There is nothing for you to apologies for though -
I am happier to have a version to play with, warts and all, than to have
to wait until there is some documentation to speak of. I would just
suggest that you put a pointer to the examples for downloading in the
README - I didn't spot the examples for a while and was working it out
by osmosis (though it makes you remember it better that way!)

> >  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 :)

Yes - that's why I won't offer any criticism for things like that just
yet. It is a work in progress and I will submit any bugs/things that
crash and anything else that may help improve it.

> >  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
:)

Yes - I suspect that though they are definitely cool, and I like cool
;-), that they will prove to actually be useful time savers as well in
certain instances. In the meantime, I will settle for cool - it makes
you look smart when people look over your shoulder ;-)

I am very much looking forward to the release of 3.0. One question to
clarify things though. I think I may have misled myself into thinking
that 3.0 would be able to use a C runtime (as in the code for the
parser, not ANTLR). I think that what I saw was that the stringtemplate
was a good thing for producing C code translations of input streams
(which it certainly looks like it is) and jumped to conclusions. I have
tried to make time to read through all the blog/notes/ideas and remember
reading about language independence. However it would seem that 3.0 will
be Java only at parser runtime?

Jim