[antlr-interest] [v3] Lack of documentation

[Mark Mandel]

I have to say, I only recently bought the book, and have been using
ANTLRv3 for about the last 6 months (I started somewhere in the beta
cycle)

Before that I had never had any experience with language parsing, and
all I had was the on-line docs and this mailing list.

Without the book, I feel like I am now quite proficient with ANTLR,
and really only recently bought it to round out my knowledge of this
tool, and to give something back to Terrence.

As an OSS author myself, I am actually very impressed with the amount
of documentation that was and is available with ANTLR. and also for
the speediness in which he will personally respond to questions on the
mailing list (which usually ends up in the wiki afterwards).

This may well be just my opinion, but since I was able to take myself
from nothing to something with v3, without the book, is a fair
testament to the time and effort Terrence has put into all aspects of
this project.

Mark

On 7/2/07, scott at javadude.com <scott at javadude.com> wrote:
> First -- I bought both books (and have contributed to ANTLR 2 and the
> eclipse plugins). I've used past versions of the tool (since early PCCTS
> releases), but had a lot of trouble figuring out v3 without the book.
>
> How is forcing someone to pay for the documentation any different than
> requiring a paid license for the tool? This is most definitely not in the
> spirit of open source.
>
> The book really feels like almost the same content that was free online
> for v2.
>
> A book shouldn't be the standard reference documentation -- it should be
> the nitty gritty details and tip and tricks of how to really use the tool
> properly.
>
>
> BTW: I'm updating my ANTLR tutorial (and I'm going to try to expand it
> further than the V2 one went.)
>
> Later,
> -- Scott
>
>
> > I get $3 measly dollars when you buy the book at amazon.  I want all
> > you whiners about the doc to either decide you can't use the tool
> > because it's not well documented enough or suck it up and start
> > helping out.  Most of the whiners are freeloaders....complaining, but
> > never having contributed themselves to open source or ANTLR before.
> > Bunch of ungrateful freeloaders...how dare you make these demands!
>
>


-- 
E: mark.mandel at gmail.com
W: www.compoundtheory.com