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

[Benjamin Shropshire]

Richard Clark wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> You brought up a really good idea -- a "what can you use this for" 
> document that shows a handful of common uses. I also want to think 
> about how to improve the initial learning pieces on the Wiki.
>
> A handful of thoughts from an old hand (who wrote or edited a bunch of 
> intro material on the Wiki): 
> 1. We could probably get enough up on the Wiki to help someone make an 
> initial evaluation of ANTLR, but developing with it pretty much 
> requires buying the book from the Pragmatic Programmers. (Which it 
> sounds like you've done, thank you. I could make that requirement 
> clearer on the Wiki.)
> 2. Really understanding what's going on sometimes requires a look at 
> the generated code and/or the runtime support classes. I understand 
> you .Net folks are dealing with a bit of a black box there.
If I had to do more, I'd look more into getting the debugger to walk 
into the runtime (I'd rebuild it if I have to) A VS.Net project we can 
drop in would be killer.

> 3. Compiler construction and its cousins Lexing and Parsing are 
> *hard*. If you think the ANTLR documentation is challenging, try 
> reading Aho, Sethi, and Ullman.

Some day I will. I'm one of the few people I know of who look forwards 
to the compilers class?

> There's a balance between setting people's expectations and scaring 
> them away. On the other hand, I appreciate constructive conversations 
> about helping people get started. (I got my start teaching software 
> development courses and I'm still partial to the newcomers. :) )

thanks for putting up with us.

> We could probably use some examples in C# and other languages. (The 
> bulk of the Wiki examples, including some very detailed tutorials, is 
> in Java.) 
>
that would help. Being able to run stuff is nice. But to a great extent 
my problem wasn't language specific.

> Thanks for the feedback,
>

your welcome.

> ...Richard
>
>
>