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

[Terence Parr]

On Mar 11, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Andy Tripp wrote:

> Gerald B. Rosenberg wrote:
>> And, design in Antlr is largely a function of the language to be  
>> recognized.  If you look at the archived grammars, what at first  
>> appears to be wildly varying styles is more a consequence of design  
>> choices tailored to the intended function of the grammars.
>>
> Here: http://www.antlr.org/pipermail/antlr-interest/2004-October/009742.html
> I compare the two ASTs built by two people for the same language  
> (Java 1.5), and the
> ASTs have some differences. There's no particular reason for the  
> differences (it's not like one person
> needed the AST to look one way, and the other another way).
>
> Again, my point is that it would be nice to have ANTLR by default  
> build a reasonable AST without
> any explicit AST-building syntax ("^" and "!") in the grammar.

how could ANTLR *possibly* know the structure of the AST to build  
except for, perhaps, expressions? parse tree, yes. AST, no.

Ter