[antlr-interest] Superclasses = best practise ...?

[Hans-Juergen Rennau]

Hello People,

this is a question about best practices when augmenting lexer and parser with 
Java code providing helper methods (or even inner classes for storare purposes).

The Maven prototype "antlr3-maven-archetype" creates example grammars which use 
super classes (AbstractTParser and AbstractTLexer). The comments in those super 
classes suggest to honour this as a general pattern: put helper methods in a 
grammar base class in order to keep the grammar light and clean. I think this 
has pros and a con. The con is that this way the compactness of 
"all-in-one-unit" is sacrificed; and reading the grammar one has to consult a 
second source. Also I noted that the Definitive Guide never made any suggestions 
to employ superclasses.

So this is my question: would you recommend the superclass approach indeed as 
the best practise, or rather regard it as a good practise one might follow or 
not, perhaps depending on complexity?

Thank you,

cheers,

-- Hans-Juergen Rennau