[antlr-interest] ANTLR 3.0 beta timing

[Terence Parr]

Hi everyone!

I'm mostly feature frozen I think for 3.0b!!!  Just got some bug  
fixes to do.  I have some cool things I'm working on but they will  
have to wait til 3.1.  I'm going to try to push 3.0b by end of  
June!!!  3 years of development ugh...perhaps it will go real right  
before school starts (mid August)?  Note that people have been using  
it for awhile now and it just reached a critical moment: I felt it  
was stable enough to actually use to build itself.  I spent all week  
rebuilding how actions are translated using an ANTLR v3 lexer grammar  
in filter mode.  I.e., I have enough confidence in the tool to use it  
for something I care about ;)  The damn thing seems to work!

Concerning a manual: nobody but Kunle and I seem to be using the wiki  
much.  As it crashes my server every 2 weeks when it runs out of  
memory, should I just turn it off?  It's a nice FAQ mechanism, so I'd  
like to keep.  How do I get people to use it?

I've decided to write the ANTLR v3 reference guide as a book and  
publish it myself using lulu.com or whatever.  There are several  
advantages:

1. you get a professionally bound book printed on demand so it's  
always got the latest errors corrected

2. I don't have the pressure of a publisher on my back

3. I can publish a draft electronic copy (HTML) for free; people can  
comment on it and more importantly actually use it before the  
finished book arrives.  The HTML would continue to live even after  
the book was available so no one is forced to pay to use the tool.

4. The book can be a bit cheaper and I get more out of it than going  
with a publisher.

5. Something like this mode will be the wave of the future for  
publishing; let's give it a shot.

Normally publishers provide marketing and a kind of validation or  
certification that your tool is real; we don't need either of these.   
The link to the book can just be on the website, which is where 100%  
of the market for the book will visit. :)  The wiki can be the FAQ I  
guess.

Any comments on v3 timing or the idea of lulu.com?

Terence