ANTLR's AST tree updating

Question

I use Lexer and Parser classes generated by ANTLR tool (targeting C#). Assume I have parsed some code and got an AST tree for it. What if part of my initial code has changed and I want to update just the corresponding parts of the tree? Is there a common way to do that? For example a line of code was inserted inside some functions body. And I want to rebuild just the part of the tree representing this function and update positions of subsequent functions tokens

Answer 1

There are a few projects out there which do what you might want to accomplish. But I don't know if ANTLR supports this. You might take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_compiler

For syntax highlighting propose only, I suggest using regular expression for the different token in your syntax. (If you update just the line you're working on you should not get any performance problems.)