[antlr-interest] new book organization question

[Dennis Benzinger]

Hi!

Am 20.08.2008 03:11, Terence Parr schrieb:
> [...]
> Identifying the target audience is crucial and I think it should be  
> essentially practicing engineers that need to implement a programming  
> language or data file format etc.

I'm quite new to ANTLR so maybe I don't fit in the target audience.

> [...]
> As for the organization of the book, I'd like to break the book up  
> into different parts/units according to language application  
> categories (reader, generator, interpreter, translator, etc...).  Each  
> part will use techniques and patterns identified in the previous  
> parts.  
> [...]
> The parts would be in this order
> 
> I. Introduction
>   basic architectures, describe application categories,
>   introduce language implementation ideas.
> 
> II. Generators (before readers because it's easier to understand)
> 
> III. Readers (parsing, introduces all of the intermediate data  
> structures too)
> [...]

I'd prefer to have the Readers part before the Generators part. You
first have to parse something before you can generate something out of
it. And because you wrote that "each part will use techniques and
patterns identified in the previous parts" I find it quite confusing to
have Readers after Generators. Does the Readers part build upon
Generators? Or am I supposed to read Readers before Generators even if
the order in the book is the the other way around?

Bye,
Dennis Benzinger