[antlr-interest] predicate question

[Gavin Lambert]

At 18:53 7/05/2008, Mark Wright wrote:
 >Note: Maybe you were thinking of a situation with syntactic
 >predicates or backtracking as well as dis-ambiguating semantic
 >predicates.  I am not using syntactic predicates or 
backtracking,
 >so I don't have any experience with them.  Instead I have 
written
 >lots of dis-ambiguating semantic predicates using hand coded
 >recursive descent compilers, which is like hand coded 
backtracking.

Interesting; I've basically taken the exact opposite path.  Most 
of my grammars either use no predicates at all, or they use 
syntactic predicates (though those are mostly in the lexer, not 
the parser).  And I've often switched on backtracking.  Generally 
for the stuff I've been working on the performance hit caused by 
backtracking is negligible compared to how much more readable it 
makes the grammar.