ANTLR

Aaron Feng — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 07:17:00 -0500

I have been following ANother Tool for Language Recognition (ANTLR) on and off for about two years now. I always felt ANTLR is one of the most exciting, and not as well known tools, out there. With ANTLR you can build a program that is able to recognize input, a recognizer, by specifying the grammar for a given input (language). ANTLR does all the dirty work for you- it builds lexical analyzers (input character stream, and output tokens) and parser (input token output syntax tree) for you when you feed it BNF grammar. Once you have a recognizer you can do all kinds of cool things like transformation. Basically you can build a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that can help you solve a problem.

I am glad to see there will be a Definitive ANTLR Reference hitting the book store soon. Currently the book is in beta and it is available for purchase in pdf form. After reading the book, I feel that I understand ANTLR at a much deeper level. I am planning to build some simple transformation tools with ANTLR in the near future. I will talk about it in later posts. If you want to be a savvy programmer, this book is a must read.

Aaron Feng: ANTLR

ANTLR