[antlr-interest] Visually display the DFA ANTLR generates

Randall R Schulz rschulz at sonic.net
Wed Jun 27 07:20:13 PDT 2007


On Wednesday 27 June 2007 07:09, Geoffrey Zhu wrote:
> I just don't know AntlrWorks's fidelity to the actual code. I already
> found one case where the ANTLRWorks interpreter works differently
> from the actual generated code. Does it read the generated code to
> build the graph?

If ANTLRworks has a deficiency, it is its lack of documentation.

As I learned here yesterday, when acting in its "Intepreter" mode, 
ANTLRworks ignores syntactic predicates. For grammars that include 
them, this makes the interpreter unuseful. And keep in mind that even 
if you do not explicitly write any syntactic predicates, if you enable 
backtracking ANTLR itself will generate syntactic predicates for you.

In these cases, you must use the ANTLRworks debugger to test your 
grammar's behavior. But it is very useful to do so.


And if there's some sort of discrepancy between ANTLRworks and ANTLR, 
it's a bug and either Terence Parr or Jean Bovet will fix it (if you 
report it).


Randall Schulz


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