Re: bison and/or antlr ?

On Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:45:02 -0400, Chris F Clark
<cfc@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote:


Hi Chris,


>SomeDeveloper <somedeveloper@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 1. If I could learn / master ONLY ONE of these two tools, which one
>> should I?
>
>If you want to just learn a tool (especially just at the pragmatic
>level), learn ANTLR first.
>
>> 2. If I could learn / master BOTH, which one should I pick first?
>
>Learing antlr (recursive descent parsing) is considerably easier.
>Learn it first.


Given some of our go-rounds in the past, I would have expected you to
advocate the opposite - learning Bison - because LR is more
educational and because Bison is a standard tool if for no other
reason.


I've been of the opinion that predicated LL(k) is "good enough" for
most uses for quite a long time - certainly for any reasonable
programming language grammar. I would still choose an LR tool for
really complex, ambiguous grammars, or for small targets where state
machines would produce tighter code for the same grammar complexity (I
used to work in embedded systems).


Have you finally decided that predicated LL(k) is worth-while or are
you just bowing to pragmatics ... any tool is better than people
rolling their own?


Just curious,
George

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