From: parrt@...
Date: 2008-09-26T15:19:38+09:00
Subject: my ears are burning... ;)

Hi Gang, sorry I seem to have pissed off the ruby gang. :)  Never
could figure out why Ryan was mad at me. Oh well.

Sorry for lack of Ruby support.  Nobody has been working on it.  I
wish somebody would.  Hopefully that would make you less annoyed with
ANTLR.

A couple of nits.  ANTLR does do some weird stuff in the lexer, though
I did it on purpose as an expedient.  That was pointed out bluntly to
me, which I appreciate.  I have it on the to do list.

As for packrat etc...  Turn on backtrack=true and ANTLR throttles up
from LL(1) to LL(*) to a PEG as necessary.  Memoization only occurs if
you say so, either on grammar or on rule.  I have plans to have ANTLR
suggest where you should memoize.  Lots of cool optimzation will
happen once I finish my next book.  Getting there.  I worked 7 days a
week for about 4 years to get v3.0 done then the book. then more
code.  now another book on DSL design patterns.

As for my attitude, most think I'm quite a nice guy.  Even a few
students! ;)  I do go off the reservation a few times a year,
though. :)  I have a few buttons that set me off related to demands
people make about my software.  I work nonstop on them for free
etc...  Anyhoo, not sure how I ran you guys off, but sorry.  Well, not
sorry if it's "heh, dumbass why don't you have a ruby target yet" ;)
ha!

Hopefully somebody will get the Ruby target working!  Pretty cool that
the retargetable codegen works, eh?  Got a guy doing emacs Lisp at the
moment, if you can believe it!

Oh, and watch for ANTLRMorph, a super cool rewrite system that lets
you speak in the concrete syntax of the language like

[stat ... expr]:
   "x+0" -> "<x>"

that means "in expr in a statement, replace x+0 with x".  Lots more
cool things for quick tweaks of code for which you have a grammar.

Regards from SF,
Terence