[antlr-interest] soliciting language recipes book outline feedback

[Terence Parr]

Howdy folks,

I've signed up to do another book for pragmatic programmers.  This  
time I'm going to do a collection of "how to" examples/recipes.  The  
book is meant to teach you how to fish not give you fish--the examples  
will be necessarily smallish. I anticipate the level being  
introductory through intermediate as real, big examples will simply  
not fit. I'd like to start out with really brain-dead examples such as  
comma separated value parsing so that I can explain the fundamentals.   
I will always remember the first technical book I read (on 6502  
assembly code code by Lance Levanthal).  This awesome book started out  
showing how to clear a memory location. This gave me the confidence  
that I might actually understand the rest of the book :)

I propose breaking the book up into three main sections: parsing,  
interpretation, translation. I would love to hear peoples feedback  
about what examples would be useful and exciting.  Keep in mind that  
the average example will need to fit in about 5 to 10 pages. Code  
samples will be made available online and not necessarily completely  
printed out in the book to save space. Also I would love to hear your  
feedback about how the recipes should be laid out or described.

Please CC Susannah Pfalzer, with whom I'm fortunate to work with  
again, on your replies as she is not a member of this list. :)

Here is my rough draft list of examples, which is a bit too few.   
Thanks and happy new year!

Ter
------------
I. Parsing recipes
	comma-separated values (show in java then python or ruby then ANTLR)
	parsing binary data (fixed and non-fixed size records)
	parsing log files (in awk/sed/grep then ANTLR)
	configuration file or JSON or YAML
	text-based network protocol (e.g., POP, nntp, http)
	graphs and networks via edge list format
	read fixed a XML format like:
		SVG (vector graphics)
		or, RDF ontology graph
	handling include files
	parsing island grammars like JSP
	simplified English imperative statement recognizer
		(E.g., games: "pick up gun and shoot spy")

II. Interpretation recipes
	arithmetic expression trees
	polynomial differentiation
	query language (parse and pull data from DB)
	serial/deserialize objects
	partial PS interpreter
	simple programming language interpreter

III. Translation recipes
	wiki to HTML
	simplified programming language pretty printer
	instrumenting simplified programming language with profiling info
	simple Java byte code generator
	simple robot control language for lego MindStorm robots
	class hierarchy generator (awk/sed/grep then grep+ANTLR)
		generates DOT format for graphviz to visualize