[antlr-interest] related tool: XSugar

[Monty Zukowski]

Actually it is BSD licensed.  You can contact the author for the source.

He uses an Earley parsing approach.

I love the concept, and the two way translation from source to target and back.

It is, however not nearly as general as ANTLR.  No arbitrary actions,
no semantic or syntactic predicates, and no tree manipulation.

I believe Møller was in the same group that did the metamorphic syntax
macro stuff, which I also admire, and which also relies on assumptions
such as LL(1) parsing.

Bringing in the full weight of ANTLR's lookahead analysis makes ANTLR
more powerful and yet not quite as malleable when it comes to things
like automatic two way transformation from source to target and back
(XSugar) and modular grammatical extensions that can detect conflicts
and issue appropriate warnings (Metamorphic syntax macros).

Monty

On 3/25/07, Gregg Reynolds <dev at mobileink.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just came across a tool that might be of interest to members of this
> list:  http://www.brics.dk/xsugar/.  Grammar-driven, vaguely antlrish
> conversion to and from XML; looks like it would be the perfect
> companion to antlr in a developer's toolkit.  (Sorry if it's already
> been mentioned; I'm probably missing the obvious, but I haven't yet
> found a search interface to the antlr-interest archives.)
>
> Doesn't appear to be open source, alas.  Maybe somebody will use antlr
> to create an open source implementation.
>
> -Gregg Reynolds
>