[antlr-interest] Documenting grammars

[Andy Tripp]

I don't think there's any reasonable way to build something that general.
Something that takes any language (e.g. Java, BNF, assembly, English, etc) and
produces any output (HTML, pdf, postscript, etc) will just be so general
as to be useless, IMO.

I think you'll end up "just" building a doclet-like API that handles
BNF-like grammars (as opposed to the Java code that doclets handle).
Then create a tool for each type of output, starting with one that produces
HTML (and that's probably the only one anyone will ever create).

Good luck with it. I'll be happy to contribute if you want help with it.
Andy

Sam Barnett-Cormack wrote:
> Okay, this weekend I plan to start work on a suitable
> language-and-paradigm-independent documentation system, with pluggable
> inputs and outputs. I've not decided what technologies to use initially,
> although you can bet that any input and output bits I write will use
> ANTLR and/or ST, appropriately. I've decided to use three
> languages/paradigms to keep in mind to help ensure agnosticism:
> 
>  * Grammars (per ANTLR)
>  * Templates (per ST)
>  * Object-Orients languages generally (which will probably cover
> procedural stuff as well, really)
> 
> I'll start with the "middle" part - working out an API for receiving and
> outputing language information.
> 
> If there's interest in this, I can either keep the list updated, or just
> those who are interested. If I get it off the ground and ANTLR folks
> don't want it in the ANTLR stable, I'll sort out other hosting and
> mailing list stuff.
> 
> Sam