[antlr-interest] Another parsing question
Gavin Lambert
antlr at mirality.co.nz
Wed Aug 6 04:33:08 PDT 2008
At 09:35 6/08/2008, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>That's probably a good idea, but will you preserve the
>current semantics, making the lazy version simply a
>performance variant, or will you allow the parser to
>influence the behavior of the lexer, as so many people
>initially believe to be possible when the come to
>ANTLR?
I'm somewhat interested in the idea of making a lexer-less parser
(basically a parser-only grammar that matches individual
characters instead of tokens). I mean, I expect the performance
will be significantly worse than the present design, but it would
permit more flexibility, and in some applications that's more
important than speed.
You could probably almost do it by making a stub lexer that
generates single-character tokens; the trouble with that idea of
course (other than being a bit kludgy) is that if you're expecting
full Unicode-range input then that's a *massive* amount of
possible tokens (and no doubt the Java compiler at least would
have a fit if you generated the token identifiers the same way as
at present). :)
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