Menu
I want to write a translator between two languages, and after some reading on the Internet I've decided to go with ANTLR. I had to learn it from scratch, but besides some trouble with eliminating left recursion everything went fine until now.
However, today some guy told me to check out Happy, a Haskell based parser generator. I have no Haskell knowledge, so I could use some advice, if Happy is indeed better than ANTLR and if it's worth learning it.
Specifically what concerns me is that my translator needs to support macro substitution, which I have no idea yet how to do in ANTLR. Maybe in Happy this is easier to do?
Or if think other parser generators are even better, I'd be glad to hear about them.
421
Java Compiler Compiler (JavaCC) is the most popular parser generator for use with Java applications. A parser generator is a tool that reads a grammar specification and converts it to a Java program that can recognize matches to the grammar.
ANTLR is a powerful parser generator that you can use to read, process, execute, or translate structured text or binary files. It's widely used in academia and industry to build all sorts of languages, tools, and frameworks.
ANTLR generates top-down, recursive-descent, mostly non- speculating parsers, which means it supports source-level de- bugging, produces high-quality error messages, and allows programmers to embed arbitrary actions.
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a tool for processing structured text. It does this by giving us access to language processing primitives like lexers, grammars, and parsers as well as the runtime to process text against them. It's often used to build tools and frameworks.
People keep believing that if they just get a parser, they've got it made when building language tools. Thats just wrong. Parsers get you to the foothills of the Himalayas then you need start climbing seriously.
If you want industrial-strength support for building language translators, see our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit. DMS provides
Regarding the OP's request to handle macros: our C, COBOL and C++ front ends handle their respective language preprocessing by a) the traditional method of full expansion or b) non-expansion (where practical) to enable post-parsing transformation of the macros themselves. While DMS as a foundation doesn't specifically implement macro processing, it can support the construction and transformation of same.
As an example of a translator built with DMS, see the discussion of converting JOVIAL to C for the B-2 bomber. This is 100% translation for > 1 MSLOC of hard real time code. [It may amuse you to know that we were never allowed to see the actual program being translated (top secret).]. And yes, JOVIAL has a preprocessor, and yes we translated most JOVIAL macros into equivalent C versions.
[Haskell is a cool programming language but it doesn't do anything like this by itself. This isn't about what's expressible in the language. Its about figuring out what machinery is required to support the task of manipulating programs, and spending 100 man-years building it.]
138
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
