[antlr-interest] What to do when you need to semantically validate an expression?
Kay Roepke
kroepke at classdump.org
Thu Dec 14 14:23:34 PST 2006
Hi Bill!
On 14. Dec 2006, at 3:31 , Bill Mayfield wrote:
> 1. Do I let ANTLR create an AST automatically or do I create a tree
> by hand with more meaningful types like Expression, Sum, etc...
You can go either way, but unless you have really specific
requirements, a homogeneous tree (all nodes are of the same class)
should do it.
You'd differentiate the subtrees by their root node (most of them
will be imaginary tokens).
> 2. The parsed result needs to be semantically validated. I presume
> I need to write custom validation logic in each type for this???
> This might answer question 1?
See question 3 ;)
>
> 3. Would it be better to write a translater by hand to translate
> the expression tree to SQL or would it be better to use a
> treewalker to do this?
A treewalker approach is the easiest to modify, IMHO, and can save
you a lot of custom code. Furthermore you have the additional benefit
of having a LL-parser for trees, too.
The semantic checks would be done in actions in that (or those) tree
parsers.
> I'm new to ANTLR, have just read (most of) the spec, and I could
> use some guidance.
Have a look at the Mantra language Terence is working on <http://
linguamantra.org>. It is using ANTLR v3, although the principle is
applicable
to v2, also. Not sure which version you will be using.
HTH,
-k
--
Kay Röpke
http://classdump.org/
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