[antlr-interest] Article against TreeWalkers

[Terence Parr]

On Mar 10, 2006, at 9:21 AM, Andy Tripp wrote:
> Anthony Youngman wrote:
>
> Design Patterns book...Strategy p315....read through the mumbo  
> jumbo...OK, I got it, a big switch
> statement can be hard to maintain when things get complicated, so  
> you could create an interface,
> many classes that each implement the interface and then each do  
> their own thing rather than you doing it
> all for them in a big switch.

hi, everybody!  Actually, I don't do that.  I create methods, one for  
each rule and switch on the lookahead to jump to the rule...not a big  
fan of lots of classes to do this for me--this is why I build tree  
recognizers not hand-built heterogeneous classes just to switch on  
token type.  Seems people are getting all sorts of stuff  
confused...got no time to clarify my position (hands still out of  
action too).

> OK, that all sounds fine, but things aren't that complicated here.  
> Each
> switch case is quite trivial. Not worth it to get fancy here. I'll  
> keep my big switch as is, and now add
> Strategy to my list of Design Patterns that I think I understand :)

Don't forget that lookahead computation is complicated by hand and in  
my experience people get it wrong.  Grammars allow automatic  
computation and more importantly warnings when you have specified  
something that would by hand go unnoticed.  Lookahead can change in  
one spot from changes elsewhere in the grammar you'll recall.  Do we  
really need to have the handbuilt parser vs grammar discussion in  
this group?  Perhaps we're not talking about parsing anymore...just  
coding.  if so, please move random coding discussions off the  
list...thanks!

Terence "if grammars are good enough for tokens, they're good enough  
for tree nodes" Parr