[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3.0ea4 released

[Terence Parr]

Howdy!

Well, I just made my (artificial) end-of-June deadline for tree  
parsing. :)  Damn thing actually seems to work.  Note that anything  
other than perfect input grammars tends to make ANTLR puke.  I'll  
worry about bad-input checking later when I rewrite v3 in v3. :)

So, ANTLR v3 early access 4 marks the completion of the major  
components: lexing, parsing, tree construction, and tree parsing.   
Naturally they are not polished, but the core functionality seems to  
be there.  ANTLR can build or parse trees of any type (indeed it  
assumes your node type is Object).

http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.0ea4.tar.gz

This version requires yet another update to the StringTemplate  
library (update is included in lib dir).  Expect ST release in July  
before my trip to Asia.

I have verified the examples work with 3.0ea4 and I have added a nice  
example of tree construction and tree parsing: simplecTreeParser.  See

http://www.antlr.org/download/examples-v3.tar.gz

Also, please see:

org/antlr/test/TestAutoAST.java
org/antlr/test/TestRewriteAST.java

for a bunch of unit tests that illustrate what is going on in terms  
of tree parsing.

Also, as I mentioned for 3.0ea3, I think i have broken the ANTLRWorks  
build/debug feature.  Jean is back soon from vacation, however.  He  
is giving a lecture at Stanford on ANTLRWorks in July so I'm guessing  
he will work hard on it before then. ;)

My plan is to fix bugs and perhaps do some tweaks on ANTLR v3 over  
the summer, but I will focus on StringTemplate in July as well as  
writing my lectures for Asia.  In August I will begin writing an  
ANTLR v3 book and a v3 summary paper for the Int'l conference on  
compiler construction (Vienna 2006).  I will then try to add more  
features to v3 and clean it up in time for the ANTLR2005 workshop at  
the end of October.  After that I will continue working on the book  
and so on as I will teach my grad languages class Spring 2006 with  
the book draft.  Also at some point I want to build a quick Java 1.5  
grammar from the language spec just to see how easy that is with LL 
(*) parsing. :)

Have fun!

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