Hi all, I'm looking to figure out ANTLR and so I'm reading this page: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Quick+Starter+on+Parser+Grammars+-+No+Past+Experience+Required
But there are a number of things I'm stuck on - and so I'm asking here for both a good explanation and so that someone with edit permission can hopefully update the wiki page to actually be "no past experience" and more helpful for future newbies. "Left recursion." Maybe it's me being dim, but it took me a while to figure how "a : a B | C ;" translated to "a : C B*;" - and whilst I get it now, perhaps a quick sentence to explain the transition might be helpful for the wiki page? "syntactic predicates" So, they're an advanced category discussed in a book... yippee! I don't have the book, and the absolute earliest I could get it (if I choose to) is Tuesday, so that's not particularly helpful. If they're going to be mentioned, they should at least have a brief explanation of when they apply, and preferably a link to an online resource that covers them. (I tried reading the Wikipedia article, but that waffles on without being very helpful.) Can anyone provide [a link to] a good, concise definition of syntactic predicates and semantic predicates and any other terms like this - for that matter, is there a good online glossary for all this sort of compiler/parser related stuff? "Difference between lexer and parser rules" This whole paragraph leaves me going "wha?". I don't know what the difference between a lexer and a parser is, so attempting to explain the difference between their rules doesn't mean much yet. There's a vague suggestion that lexers look at literals (whether explicit or combined via multiple rules), and parsers look at everything else, but even then I'm not sure I get the implications of that? What's a symbolic name? In the example, what does the "EQUALS='=';" syntax do? Should that be a colon, or is something else happening? What about IMAGINERY_TOKEN - what's that doing? I'm now confused about tokens and non-terminal symbols - they are obviously different, but how? In the example for "How to build a grammar from a language specification", the FILE rule is not in the tokens section Does that make it a non-terminal symbol? Is this example grammar handled by a lexer or a parser or both? I do have some other questions, but they're not directly related to the wiki page, so I'll leave them for a later email, once I have a better idea of what's what. Thanks, Peter 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
