Re: ANTLR grammar for Ada available

[Vincent DIEMUNSCH <vincent.diemunsch@gmail.com>]

Le lundi 31 décembre 2018 06:38:20 UTC+1, alby....@gmail.com a écrit :
> Hi Vincent
> 
> I would be very interested in your reasoning in saying that ANTLR v4 is more
> complex than V3. In my experience v4 capabilities in auto generating a AST and
> being able to visit/listen to specific nodes in the AST far surpasses the V3
> capabilities and make it easier to parse Ada Syntactically at a rudimentary level.

Hi Alex,

You are certainly right about the quality of the generated AST, superior in V4. My point was simply that, from a pure parser perspective, the ability of backtracking and memorizing previous attempts, as it is done in V4, although more powerful, is not necessary for parsing the Ada language. Hence it seemed to me perfectly reasonable to stay in V3 for Ada, if the runtime support already exists.

But if the advantage of a better AST is really big, then developing an Ada runtime for ANTLR V4 may be the best choice :-).

Regards,

Vincent