Re:ANTLR 4.6 Released
by chrisseaton on Friday December 16, 2016 @03:20PM
(#13196410)
To be fair to ANTLR I think it might have actually wanted a CharSequence, which is a bit more pragmatic, and I could probably have wrapped my byte[] in an object implementing that interface.
The real problem I should mentioned was that I seemed to be using very little of the real ANTLR parsing algorithm, as there was so much logic in actions to parse a real language like Ruby. These languages aren't designed with a formal grammar model in mind. They just do what they do and it's your problem if ANTLR isn't designed for what they want.
Actions are the grammar equivalent of unsafe blocks in languages like Rust or Haskell. If you are using them in an application it's a red flag, and I never managed to write an ANTLR grammar without them. That then makes the red flag on ANTLR, not on my programming skills.
The real problem I should mentioned was that I seemed to be using very little of the real ANTLR parsing algorithm, as there was so much logic in actions to parse a real language like Ruby. These languages aren't designed with a formal grammar model in mind. They just do what they do and it's your problem if ANTLR isn't designed for what they want.
Actions are the grammar equivalent of unsafe blocks in languages like Rust or Haskell. If you are using them in an application it's a red flag, and I never managed to write an ANTLR grammar without them. That then makes the red flag on ANTLR, not on my programming skills.