[antlr-interest] Question about lexer/parser boundaries
Phil Oliver
antlr at olivercomputing.com
Tue Jun 5 09:21:21 PDT 2007
Jim - thanks for your last reply. I decided to drop trying to make it
LL(1) for now and do more in the parser and I'm slowly making
progress that way - at least I have it compiling and debugging even
though it's not quite right yet. ANTLR (or perhaps I should say
ANTLRworks since that's the way I use ANTLR) is great tool but I see
it as rough around the edges when it comes to helping you identify
grammar problems or handling its own errors. For example, it took me
a while to realize that when I get a "Cannot connect" error in the
debugger in Antlrworks that it was the compiled grammar silently
blowing up (out of memory because of an unidentified grammar problem)
without the exception being trapped and reporting back. I would say
that's a bug in the debugger setup.
There are also serious bugs in the ANTLRworks editor, it's mangled
find/replace more than once. I think that's a case where re-using an
existing mature editor (maybe something from Eclipse) would be a
better approach. In that respect (and others), the commercial ANTLR
Studio Eclipse plugin is making better use of the framework of a very
powerful development tool, though unfortunately I'm not sure if the
developer plans to update it for ANTLR v3 (anybody know?)
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