[antlr-interest] philosophy about translation

[Terence Parr]

On Oct 10, 2006, at 1:38 PM, Monty Zukowski wrote:
> Note that the E language guys came up with a nice shorthand described
> tersely here:  http://www.erights.org/elang/grammar/quasi-terms.html
> and http://www.erights.org/elang/grammar/quasi-xml.html.  Basically it

cool.

> lets you parse something like ADD @v1:expr TO @v2:expr into a tree
> that can be matched against your source tree.  Then you can write the
> --> @v2 += @v1 on the other side, which is parsed into a tree and it
> will substitute the AST nodes appropriately,   So basically you are
> specifying in text yet working in trees.
>
> Ter, I think we discussed this at the Cabal.  The trick is that the
> parser and lexer needs to know how to just return a generic EXPR token
> for @v1:expr -- and build a tree with that as a placeholder.

Correct.  We discussed and I remember your excellent trick of doing  
that EXPR node well!  Been thinking about it ever since :)

>> Personally,  I think that a hybrid system that does most of the work
>> in a tree walker but with rules, for all of the special cases that
>> Andy has pointed out, would be great!
>>
>
> Yes, I agree.  This is quite an interesting discussion.

Heh heh heh...hopefully the current ANTLR book (in prep) or next will  
be able to delve into these questions!

Ter