[antlr-interest] A postmortem of my use of antler

[Benjamin Shropshire]

Mark Mandel wrote:
> Honestly,
>
> With the amount of help that is available through this mailing list,
> it pretty much cancels out any deficiencies that may or may not exist
> in the documentation.
>   

Some people will accept or reject a program on the docs. They will 
decide whether or not the product is suitable before there even try the 
help system. Some people will only ever use the docs. I have no 
evidence, but I suspect that most of the people who look at and then 
don't uses antlr do both steps an about 5-10 minutes and you never hear 
from them at all.

>  I had never worked on a Lexer or a Parser before,

That might actually be a benefit. From what I have seen, antlr doesn't 
work quite like a normal lexer/parser generator and the differences, 
while hugely important, aren't well highlighted.

>  but I
> did have to look outside ANTLR's documentation to do it, and I don't
> think that is unreasonable.
>   

I'm not talking only about the official docs. Even the other resources 
don't do much better IMHO.

> I actually bought the book * after * I had used ANTLR for quite a
> while, and all I can say is that it is an incredible resource.
>
> Now, I have to assume as well, you're offering to help write all this
> missing documentation? It is a Wiki after all, so I expect that after
> this post you'll be quite active?
>   

No, actually this is more a "why I don't expect to be using antlr any 
more" e-mail. I don't really expect anything to change. I'm passing on 
what made antler hard for me to use, what would have made it easier and 
hoping that future work on the docs will take it into account.

Truth be told, I really have no more reason to care. The only place I 
might be using antlr, it will only get used if it can be made to work 
with under about 25 LOC: grab antlr, grab a complete C grammar with AST 
output, write a main() that parses a file and prints 
ReturnedAST.toString(). All told, I might spend another hour tops 
working with antlr in the next few. years.