[antlr-interest] Serious Bug when using BitSetgeneration

Ric Klaren ric.klaren at gmail.com
Wed Nov 9 06:51:52 PST 2005


Hi,

Geir Ove Skjaervik wrote:
> Just one more comment on this Bug. It is ** clearly ** a bug, since
> ANTLR does work correctly when BitSets are NOT used. I find it strange
> that this Bug  seems to be passed in almost silence: I would think it to
> be rather serious to have a "sleeping" bug that may come and bite you
> any time you encounter the right conditions.

1) As you yourself mentioned there is a workaround. Also you seem to be
the only one that ran into this so far.
2) We cannot reproduce the bug since you don't supply us with the
necessary information to find it: e.g. a clear piece of code that
demonstrates it. I tinkered a bit with the example code you provided but
cannot reproduce it. Terence spent time on it and he cannot reproduce
it. So it's apparently something deeper down in your grammar.

Did you try older antlr versions on the code to see whether it was
introduced in one of the last releases, this might help us narrowing
down where to look? Running the grammar on older antlr's should not take
long.

> Terrence asked me to try to produce a small grammar example to try to
> reproduce the problem. I will as soon as time on my project permits it.

> BUT I would think it is equally IMPORTANT for the ANTLR team to try to
> hunt down this ** serious ** bug. It is nice that ANTLR 3.0 is under
> development, but we sure need a strong ** core ** technology that won't
> fail.

Hunting bugs blindly is a waste of time. FYI all ANTLR developers have
fulltime jobs not involving ANTLR. Looking at antlr2 code without
knowing what triggers a bug is useless -> provide a good bugreport that
demonstrates the problem!

For me this bug is on ice untill *you* produce a good defect report.

Shouting at us will really not make things go faster. If the speedloss
is a big issue then you should check with your management to get the
time to help us track down this bug. Taking out your stress on us will
not help you.

Cheers,

Ric


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