[antlr-interest] related tool: XSugar

Gregg Reynolds dev at mobileink.com
Mon Mar 26 19:31:09 PDT 2007


On 3/26/07, Monty Zukowski <monty at codetransform.com> wrote:
> Actually it is BSD licensed.  You can contact the author for the source.

Didn't know that; that's great.  "Source available on request" usually
scares me off, but I suppose they just haven't gotten around to
packaging it up properly, or don't want the hassle of leading an open
source project.

> 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).

I'm afraid the theory flies a ways over my head, but it sure seems
cool that one could use antlr to create processors specialized for a
(human-readable) domain language and be able to use XSugar to get all
the benefits of (barely human-readable) XML e.g. for documentation.
Might not work for all languages, but for data languages in particular
I would think one could do interesting things (my own little project
is a typesetting language).  Then again, there's always Lua.  ;)

-gregg


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