Re: Error reporting/recovery

    Jean-Marc Bourguet <bourguet@my-deja.com> wrote:
> The parser generators I know of (I've looked at yacc variants and
> pccts) are bad at error reporting/recovery at least when not helped
> by suitable addition in the grammar description. I know that the
> field has been studied and I'm quite sure that yacc is not at the
> state of the art in this matter, so I wondered:
> - if there was other parser generators freely available
> who did a better jobs,
> - if there was an available benchmark (grammars and
> input) to test the error reporting/recovery of parser
> generators.


I use ANTLR, which has excellent error reporting "right out of the
box". ANTLR generates a recursive decent parser, which tends to have
beeter error reporting. I looked at a number of alternatives when I
was faced with doing another large project with YACC. I just dreaded
putting in the error productions for a Java grammar. I wrote up a web
page with my notes. See


http://www.bearcave.com/software/antlr/antlr_expr.html


ANTLR, like most parser generators, has a fairly steep learning
curve. See my web pages and the www.antlr.org web pages.


    Ian Kaplan

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