Where Are All the Grammar Options in Antlr3?

Question

In Antlr2 there were numerous grammar options that could be set (reference). Now in Antlr3 we have like 1/3 of the amount of options (reference).

So I have two questions concerning this:

1. Does anyone know why so many options were taken out and are any of them coming back?
2. Does Antlr3 have the ability to do what Antlr2 could, even without all those options?

To be more specific on my second question, I want to be able to do a few things. First, I want to change the visibility of the generated lexer and parser classes (i.e. Antlr2 option "classHeaderPrefix").

Secondly, I want to be able to ignore any whitespace tokens found within certain keywords, like having "&keyword&" and "& k ey w o rd &" both match (i.e. Antlr2 option "ignore", I think?).

Finally, I want to make certain keywords case insensitive (i.e. Antlr2 option "caseSensitive").

Answer 1

BluePlateSpecial wrote:

To be more specific on my second question, I want to be able to do a few things. First, I want to change the visibility of the generated lexer and parser classes (i.e. Antlr2 option "classHeaderPrefix").

In v3 there is no way to do this.

BluePlateSpecial wrote:

Secondly, I want to be able to ignore any whitespace tokens found within certain keywords, like having "&keyword&" and "& k ey w o rd &" both match (i.e. Antlr2 option "ignore", I think?).

That options might have been removed because the LL(*) algorithm in the lexer is far more powerful than what was used in v2. Now, there is no need for such an option since this would do the trick:

FOO
  :  '&' (' ' | 'a'..'z')+ '&'
  ;

BluePlateSpecial wrote:

Finally, I want to make certain keywords case insensitive (i.e. Antlr2 option "caseSensitive").

That is also not possible in v3 other than doing it the "hard" way:

BAR
  :  ('b' | 'B') ('a' | 'A') ('r' | 'R')
  ;