On 24-08-15 15:36, Thomas Beale wrote:
Antlr4 rule capabilities and particularly pattern matching is weaker
than yacc/lex (in some cases quite a lot weaker),
Of course, Yacc/lex can only be used to generate C-code. It's
functionality in pattern matching is limited to this.
To do whatever you need to do, writing a compiler, translating
programming languages into another (transpiler), translating a query
language into another, processing data, JSON,. XML, CSV, to many custom
made targets, generated code accessible to choose for a listener/visitor
or tree pattern, and having scoped symbol tables, that is where Antlr
comes in.
That is why I have seriously picked up in learning to work with this.
Regarding to pattern matching, its left/right associativity and direct
left recursion make it an unique tool.
It is also very matured, as it is now in version 4.5. Especially it has
grown a lot in the 4.x-version. Terence Parr researched 25 years parsers
and parser generators.
Translating AQL to xQuery, must be very easy.
I think it is very suitable for the task Erik is mentioning, he is only
wanting to define the grammar, as far as I understand.
What to do with it then, it is reasonably easy by using the
Antlr-generated code pattern.
You can even translate the generated Java code to Eiffel by using Antlr ;-)
I think that is not very hard to do.
I checked it with parsing Pascal, Java, CSV, JSON, XML, I did not
encounter any weakness.
I was pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of some grammars.
There are grammars and test files for many other languages.
Maybe the weakness is C-related? It is what one expects because the
nature of Yacc/lex.
Although Java has a lot of syntax similarities with C.
Of course, there are bugs in Antlr, quite a few (105 open at this moment
for Antlr4.5), but I do not consider them yet as a weakness of the concept.
But maybe some are.
I did not see anyone else referring in that way to it.
So I was not aware of any issues in pattern recognition. It sounds like
a serious issue.
I think there must be good information about this.
Can you give more information or an example of this pattern-matching
weakness.
Thanks
Bert
_______________________________________________
openEHR-technical mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org
