[antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 1.4 released

Damien Urruty lepilache at hotmail.com
Fri May 14 00:32:09 PDT 2010


Why don't you create a checkbox in the Preferences, to activate / deactivate the automatic check. That would be a cool feature !

On May 12, 2010, at 12:25 PM, Terence Parr wrote:

Wow. This is really weird, because that is my exact setup!

OH! Duh.I am not looking at the console. I'm an idiot. doh! ok, what is the
suggested solution? I'm sure I can fix it for Jean.   as Jim suggests, you can
simply turn up the delay  for the grammar analysis. I guess it should simply not
spit out any errors at all and simply highlight the elements in the grammar
text, right?

Ter
<snip>
Ter:

This is a problem with human interface design, and humans are notoriously error
prone and impatient which makes human interface design very difficult. What
typically happens with me is ANTLRWorks starts up with the Syntax Diagram
display, I do an extensive edit, ask it to Generate Code, it tells me there are
errors and to check the Console, I go there to see the errors and they start
scrolling off the screen as it continues to report errors due to intermediate
changes that have not fixed the error I am working on. Turning up the delay is
an unintuitive kluge that will continually cause problems for newbys. Also
ANTLRWorks became less stable after this behavior appeared and less responsive.
Could the error reporting be keeping track of more state than earlier versions?

Think about what you want from the console and even if you want the console. Can
the functionality be put in the Interpreter or Debugger? A keyboard command to
go to the next error could work well in another window.

If you had a mode that distinguished errors and only errors that might be good.
For me highlighting is already being overused. Why do you need to visually
distinguish minor aspects of syntax? Particularly when most syntactic elements
are already distinguished by capitalization rules. How do the color blind deal
with it?

How is ANTLRWorks deciding  when to check for errors? From Jim's comment it
sounds as if it checks if a given interval has passed since the last keystroke.
I would instead check either after a command to check, or after one of a finite
set of keystrokes i.e. a carriage return or a space that would not normally be
associated with changing an ANTLR lexical item. I would make checking after
those keystrokes a user selectable preference. I would never check after a
delete or the entry of a printable character.

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