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

[Sam Harwell]

With a carefully designed algorithm, autocomplete actually works quite well
in an ANTLR grammar. I went over portions of the algorithm with Ter in the
past, but it's outside the scope of what he's working on for ANTLR 4. A
partial implementation will be included in the next release of my Visual
Studio integration (clean and working, but missing a few features I've
designed on paper).

The new parsing algorithms I'm using do a great job of handling incomplete
syntax, but use a very different type of parser than ANTLR generates. They
also allow local analysis of a fragment of text within a file with a
constant-time complexity WRT the size of the file, so it performs as well
while editing a 1MB grammar as it does with a  1KB grammar. I'm hoping to
create a modified version of the ANTLR tool that can produce these parsers
from an ANTLR grammar.

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org
[mailto:antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Jim Idle
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 10:41 AM
To: Antlr-Interest Antlr.Org
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 2 (for ANTLR v4)

That's an ANTLR request (which has already been considered), not a Works
request.

However, the new IDE should use a smarter parser that can handle incomplete
syntax better - as in, it is coded to recognize such things where it is
possible. Note that autocomplete does not really work for ANTLR grammars as
almost all tokens can be a possibility in most places.


Jim