[antlr-interest] Thanks
Lance Gutteridge
lance at thinkingworks.com
Tue May 10 15:47:34 PDT 2005
This is not a question, just a thanks to Terence and all the others who
work on ANTLR.
I was doing a project that needed a small language (well it was small when
it started - isn't that the way). I considered writing my own parser on
the basis that the language was simple and I was on a deadline, and I
didn't want to take the learning curve hit. (I had used ANTLR some years
earlier but I had forgotten most of that).
In any event I decided to go with ANTLR. That certainly was the right
decision.
I found all kinds of examples on various web sites and I was able to put my
language together pretty quickly. It has grown and grown. I am so glad
that I decided to go with a real parser instead of some cobbled together
Java code that I was thinking of. Making changes to the grammar has been
so easy with ANTLR.
For example. Just now I decided to add comments to the language. I had
ignored white space and I was thinking that adding comments might be
difficult. I found an example on a web site cut and pasted the lines into
my grammar and lo and behold - single line comments. So cool.
If I have a problem now its that adding constructs into the language is so
easy that I'm in danger of adding too much stuff.
I'm like a lot of programmers in that I've always wanted to do my own
language. I'm working on the specific domain of accounting systems and I
have always thought there was a need for a tool that actually addressed
that specific domain in the right way. So now I get to design my own
language and ANTLR has saved me from the grunt work of doing all that
parsing and let me concentrate on the specific constructs that I want.
Thanks Terence et al.
Lance
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