I'm interested in making a simple editor for my ANTLR grammar. The key things I want are autocomplete and syntax highlighting. So after digging through the book, I did a little digging on the list.
Back in June 2008, Terrence Parr talked about making the NFA's available at runtime for such use. http://groups.google.com/group/il-antlr-interest/browse_thread/thread/7c6d05a35046854d In November 2008, Sam Harwell suggested that ANTLR was not appropriate for autocompletion (although it was deemed appropriate for scanning the larger project and populating the cache used by autocompletion). http://www.antlr.org/pipermail/antlr-interest/2008-November/031576.html In May 2009, Sam Harwell discussed the use of simplified lexers to facilitate syntax highlighting in Visual Studio. He makes a number of insightful comments on VS's implementation/contract and best practices. http://www.antlr.org/pipermail/antlr-interest/2009-May/034592.html Did Terrence make any headway with runtime access of NFA's? It seems that Harwell's concerns about performance and robustness could be addressed by having parsers work incrementally, pausing at the current, incomplete token and giving the developer access to current runtime NFA state, perhaps resolving ambiguity by following multiple still-valid paths on the NFA and only using look-ahead to rank possibilities. (The above may be badly formulated, infeasible, or just plain incorrect.) Harwell wrote a special grammar for common cases of incomplete expressions. Is that still a pretty good way to go? I'm prepared to move ahead given what I know, but any updated thinking on this subject would be much appreciated. Thanks, -Adam List: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/listinfo/antlr-interest Unsubscribe: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/options/antlr-interest/your-email-address -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "il-antlr-interest" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/il-antlr-interest?hl=en.
