[antlr-interest] Problem, with minimal problem-causing grammar

[Terence Parr]

On Jun 9, 2007, at 9:45 PM, Phil Oliver wrote:

> I've been having problems defining a grammar in ANTLRworks (1.0.2,  
> latest) - I keep getting the "java.net.ConnectException: Connection  
> refused: connect" problem, which, contrary to the assumptions of  
> some, does not appear to have anything to do with port numbers, but  
> with an uncaught Java out of memory problem. Every generated  
> grammar that I've tested in Eclipse, that has that problem in  
> ANTLRworks, blows up with an out of memory error, despite having  
> over a gigabyte of RAM available to the JVM.

Interesting. I get that memory error unless I use:

java -Xmx80M Test

  which makes sense because all of the keywords you have.  The DFA  
must be huge.  Yep, if you look at DFA4_eotS, which is a run length  
encoding of the DFA tables, you'll see that they can get very big.   
80M seems to make it work okay.

> This is (almost) the minimal problem grammar that I could create  
> that causes the problem, a very simple one. No grammar errors are  
> flagged. If there's an obvious problem to fix (that actually does  
> fix it), I'd appreciate some feedback. Otherwise it looks like a  
> bug in ANTLR to me, I'm guessing some kind of code generation  
> resulting in an infinite loop that depletes memory.

  just increase the memory a little bit.

>
> Some notes: removing say a few more random token definitions seems  
> to clear up the problem. Removing either StrNoHash or StrNoQuotAmp  
> removes the problem as well (but both together do not blow up when  
> the number of predefined tokens is slightly reduced.) Changing k=*  
> to k=1 doesn't fix anything.

ANTLR does not seem to like tokens that can match no characters,  
which you have a grammar:

StrNoHash                       : CharNoHash*;
StrNoQuotAmp                    : CharNoQuotAmp*;

These are meaningless because (...)* loops are optional. I think  
antlr might be going crazy here for these tokens, but I believe I  
have a bug report and already.

  thanks for the report.

Ter