Re: parsing tools, was Dragon Book - update necessary?

> I have been really tempted to learn ANTLR. It seems like it would be
> the right tool for writing HLA v2.0. However, having gotten burned on
> HLA v1.0, I'm real concerned about investing the time to learn another
> compiler tool plus three years writing the compiler only to discover
> that I should have stuck with C/C++ and a recursive descent approach.
> Randy Hyde


I think that writing a compiler of that size in recursive descent would
be a maintenance nightmare. ANTLR generates the recursive descent code
for you from a grammar specification. However, as you painfully
discovered, you will be married to the tool, for better or for worse.


I would also point out that a recursive program tends to be much slower
than an iterative one. A few years back, I compared my table-driven C
recognizer to the one provided with ANTLR. Mine was about three times
faster when executed on the ANTLR source code itself.


If you send me a non-flattened, actionless version of your grammar, I
will run it through my parser-generator to see if the language is strong
LL(k), for some reasonable value of k.

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