Application: ANTLR
David Jones
dej at coup.inode.org
Fri Mar 22 10:49:46 PST 2002
The application I am interested in is ANTLR, post-2.0. Jim asked me
to post this.
ANTLR is a recursive-descent parser generator - you specify a grammar,
typically for a programming language, in a concise form, and ANTLR
will generate C++ or Java code for the parser.
What sets ANTLR apart from other parser generators supporting C++ as a target
is syntactic and semantic predicates. Using these, it is possible to
implement grammars that could not otherwise be easily implemented
in any other parser generator. (Example: VHDL. It's possible, but
very painful, using an LALR(1) generator such as yacc. Trivial in ANTLR.)
ANTLR started off as PCCTS, a package originally coded in C++. With version
2.0, Terence Parr did a complete rewrite, and chose Java as the implementation
language. Although ANTLR can generate C++ code, you still require a
Java 1.0+ implementation in order to run the generator itself.
More information: http://www.antlr.org/
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