Since I didn't understand your question I assume that my statement was somehow incorrect (likely because I made some wrong assumptions about ANTLR). I didn't know about its existence until today and still don't understand it completely. What I think I understood is that it uses DFA for deciding which grammar rule to apply instead of doing backtracking. I also think that it uses DFA for low-level scanning (I'm not sure).
ANTLR 3 doesn't use a DFA unless it needs to. If unlimited lookahead is not called for, it uses standard LL(k) or perhaps it uses the modified (approximate? I forget the name) LL(k) from ANTLR 2. DFA comes into play, for instance, if you need to check what comes after an argument list (of, unlimited, length) before you can decide that it *is* an argument list and start the "real" parsing (The author says LL(k) is too inefficient so he used a restricted form of it; personally I'm not convinced, but I digress)
