[antlr-interest] philosophy about translation

[Terence Parr]

On Oct 6, 2006, at 10:36 AM, Johnicholas Hines wrote:

> Is the deep analysis that Andy Tripp's COBOL to Java project requires
> a corner case of ANTLR usage? It seems to me he's building at least a
> full dataflow graph, which I believe is more extreme than most
> transformations.
>
> My projects with antlr include things like "replicate bash's
> brace-expansion in a standalone tool", and "convert pure lambda
> calculus to continuation-passing style".

Yes, you are right.  My simple polynomial differentiation translator  
worked great.  One could argue however that showing declarative rules  
in this case would be easy also:

<a=int><id><c=int> --> <a*c><id><c-1>

Andy: how do you deal with references to grammatical constructs such  
as <expr>? ANTLR you only work with tokens, period?    How do you  
deal with extreme context like you need to do a translation on this  
expression but only if it's the expression within a while within a  
particular function?

Ter