[antlr-interest] public final void mFOO() in lexers?

[Gavin Lambert]

At 03:58 21/03/2008, Kenneth Domino wrote:
 >I was looking at the code generated for lexers and I noticed 
that
 >token type rules are translated into public routines, not 
private.
 >I understand why rules are public in parsers, and why mTokens()
 >is public.  But, I don't understand why this is the case for the 

 >rest of the token rules in the lexer.  Is there a reason why,
 >maybe to influence the lexing by selecting some subset of rules?

I don't know if this is the real reason, but having them public is 
useful for unit tests.  You can then do testing both at the 
individual rule level ("assuming we already know this is the right 
token, can it match all the right input we want?") as well as the 
complete input level ("given this entire input stream, does it 
generate the right sequence of tokens?").

The ANTLR grammar does let you specify "private", "protected", or 
"public" on a rule.  I'm not sure if it actually uses that in the 
code generation or not, but if you really wanted private rules you 
could give it a try.