Why Strings as Classes?

[BCS]

Reply to Benji,

> BCS wrote:
> 
>> Reply to Benji,
>> 
>>> I've used ANTLR a few times. It's nice.
>>> 
>> I've used it. If you gave me the choice of sitting in a cardboard
>> small box all day or using it again, I'll sit in the cardboard box
>> because I fit in that box better.
>> 
> I've always been impressed by the capabilities of ANTLR. The
> ANTLRWorks IDE is a very cool way to develop and debug grammars, and
> Terrence Parr is one of those people that pushes the research into
> interesting new areas (he wrote something a few months ago about
> simplifying the deeply-recursive Expression grammar common in most
> languages that I found very insightful).
> 
> The architecture is pretty cool too. Text input in consumed and AST's
> are constructed using token grammars, which are then transformed using
> tree-grammars, and code-generation is performed by output grammars.
> It's a very elegant system, and I've seen some example projects that
> used a sequence of those grammars to translate code between different
> programming languages. It's cool stuff.
> 
> So I appreciate ANTLR from that perspective. I think the theory behind
> the project is top-notch.
> 
> But the syntax sucks. Badly. The learning curve is waaaay too steep
> for me, so I've always had to keep the documentation close by. And
> once the grammars are written, they're hard to read and maintain.
> 
> Also, there's a strong bias in the ANLTR community toward ASTs. I
> prefer to construct a somewhat higher-level parse tree. For example:
> given the expression "1 + 2", I'd like the parser to construct a
> BinaryOperator node, with two Expression node children and an enum
> "operator" field of "PLUS". I'd like it to use a set of pre-defined
> "parse model" classes that I've written to represent the language
> elements.
> 
> It's hard to do that kind of thing in ANTLR, which usually just
> creates a "+" node with children of "1" and "2".
> 
> The majority of my parser-generator experience has been with JavaCC,
> which leaves model-generation to the user, which works better for me.
> 
> --benji
> 

My feeling's exactly (or near enough)