[antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 2 (for ANTLR v4)

[James Reid]

I for one would like to see it based off of the Netbeans Platform.  I have
my own editor for an inhouse language that is built on top of Netbeans and I
use ANTLR for my lexing/parsing and the parsing loop works great.

With that aside, my biggest complaint would be the editor responsiveness
that Andreas was talking about.  I also agree about the way Netbeans does it
(half second after user stops typing).

Another thing I would like to see is a menu/toolbar action to automatically
generate debug versions of the current grammar.  I rarely launch the AW
debugger directly.  I mainly have to use the remote debugger because of the
way my project is setup in Netbeans.  So I have to open the preferences
(which sometimes takes several several seconds) type in -debug generate the
language, move the files to my project to test it out.  Then, when I believe
it's working, or I see what I was doing wrong, I have to open the
preferences again (which sometimes takes a while) remove the -debug
and regenerate.  This process gets to be tedious and annoying after doing it
several times in a row.

Another complaint would be the general GUI Look and Feel.  Maybe I'm
spoiled, but after working in the Netbeans environment and then moving to AW
to work on my grammar stuff feels like a "downgrade".  Don't get me wrong,
AW is great and it's helped me out enormously.  I don't like the way the
docking/undocking of the AST panel during debugging works.  Actually, I'm
not a fan of the docking situation in general.  So, yeah the flow of the GUI
in general needs an overhaul in my opinion.

Man, I wish I had more free time or I would start working on an AW
integration into Netbeans and/or a standalone Netbeans RCP of AW.

James Reid

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 4:43 AM, Douglas Godfrey <douglasgodfrey at gmail.com>wrote:

> 1) Extend the Refactor:RemoveLeftRecursion function to either assist in
> removing or automatically remove left recursion loops that involve more
> than 1 rule
>
> 2) Tighter integration between AntlrWorks and Antlr to report the source
> of ambiguities found during code generation and resolve them
>
> 3) Antlr grammar access to the symbol table classes already present in
> Antlr
>   i.e. defining symbol table entries and accessing symbol attributes
> without productions
>
> 4) Enable debugging grammars for targets other than Java by inserting
> calls to a function that communicates with the AntlrWorks debugger
>
> On 9/1/11 2:18 PM, "Terence Parr" <parrt at cs.usfca.edu> wrote:
>
> >Hi, In parallel with the development of ANTLR v4, superstar Colin Bean
> >will be building the new version of ANTLRWorks. We already have a great
> >base in what Jean Bovet did for the 1st version. It's a known entity and
> >has lots of bookkeeping code that we can cut and paste into the new one
> >such as the automatic update facility and preferences. Because we've got
> >something to play with, we have something to critique and also a basic
> >target.
> >
> >I can imagine the basic tool being missing but it would be great to get
> >feedback from the antlr community.  Remember, that there are probably 2
> >main communities: the people new to languages and/or ANTLR and the people
> >very used to working with ANTLR grammars. For example, new people tend to
> >like the syntax diagrams but many old-timers like myself prefer looking
> >at the grammar because it's more terse.  Recognizing that we must serve
> >both those communities, please comment with any thoughts on the following:
> >
> >* What feature seemed like a good idea, but didn't end up being that
> >valuable? You can say even heretical things like: " the single step
> >feature in the debugger just didn't seem to be that useful beyond
> >learning about parsing"
> >
> >* Do you use the re-factoring? Keep in mind that v4 will automatically
> >handle direct left recursion.
> >
> >* What features do you think are really critical to add?
> >
> >* What features could be really great if we improved them?
> >
> >* Do we need better export facilities?   would you really use things like
> >"export grammar as hyperlinked HTML", for example.
> >
> >* What parts of the debugger did you use? There is a lot of stuff in
> >there like: breakpoints on input tokens, step forward, step backward,
> >jump to the end, break on specific kinds of events, break at specific
> >line in the grammar, show the parse tree, show the AST constructed, list
> >to the incoming events, etc...  Should we rethink the entire notion of
> >the debugger at something that simply displays information about what it
> >sees during the parse?  I.e., doesn't need to be a controller in the
> >sense that you can single step the actual running parser over the usual
> >socket connection?
> >
> >You might include whether you are in the newbie or experienced camp or
> >somewhere in between.
> >
> >Udo Borkowski has already implemented a fantastic tree layout algorithm
> >from an academic paper. The performance is extremely good and the results
> >are tight.  Colin will probably implement his own syntax diagram viewer
> >so that we can make it more than just a pretty picture. We want to
> >highlight elements and step through etc.
> >
> >Thanks!
> >Ter
> >
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