[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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