From: Clifford Heath <no@...>
Date: 2008-09-26T21:54:35+09:00
Subject: Re: my ears are burning... ;)

parrt@antlr.org wrote:
> Hi Gang, sorry I seem to have pissed off the ruby gang.

Terrence,

As one of those who has perhaps said some of the harshest things,
I acknowledge that situations can escalate due to misinterpretation,
and that not everything may have been as it appeared.

I freely acknowledge your singular achievement in ANTLR from a
technological perspective, and hope that one day it will represent
the same caliber of work from the usability point of view, creating
no nasty surprises, such as I and many others encountered with the
lexer and in some other areas.

> 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.

There's certainly no shortage of interest here in building parsers to
execute within Ruby programs, despite Ruby's sweet DSL capabilities.
There is however definitely an expectation that the POLS will apply,
and ANTLR's ruby support hasn't created much love from that angle yet.

> A couple of nits.  ANTLR does do some weird stuff in the lexer

It turns out that in my case, I simply needed to do almost all my
lexing in the parser; had I realised that things could have been
much easier.

> 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.

Did you see my suggestion that rather than trying to find those
places analytically, that it be done using a test workload?
Might that provide a shortcut to a solution?

> 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" ;)

I haven't seen that being said anywhere. I chose ANTLR initially
because I want to target other languages. The Ruby quirks I was
quite prepared to fix (and I'd begun that)... but rude responses
to my asking about generic oddities stretched my patience too far,
so I found another way to solve my problem.

> 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!

Actually, yes it is cool that it works, but most of us here have
an expectation that a templating system will be much nicer and easier
to use than yours. Not that there's anything really wrong with yours,
but Ruby does excel at templating.

Clifford Heath.