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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

Glad to hear the ANTLR vs Yacc holy way (a.k.a. LL vs LR) is still going strong. This one holy war may actually be older than emacs vs vi.

Have the ANTLR guys dropped their Java credo or they're still thinking they are going to convince any C developer with a .jar?

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This is actually the first time I've even heard of ANTLR, which came about in the early 90's. But yacc/lex/vi/emacs, et al have been around since the 70's. The emacs vs. vi holy war was pretty much instant, but doomed every time one spoke of headless devices such as routers.

Antlr and LL(k) parsers in general are great when they fit the grammar you want to make well. I remember discovering it when it was called JavaCC a nod to yacc.

Heh. at my grad school we had a pccts fan (antlr before java even existed) and he actually tried to paint the LR vs LL war as a american vs european thing (this was in france).

I wrote a parser for a DSL using ANTLR about ten-ish years ago, and it was an incredibly painful experience. There's very little freely-available documentation for ANTLR, most of it is just "buy my book". ANTLR doesn't know anything about the language it's targeting (not even Java), so if you name a rule e.g., `while` the generated code will be filled with errors, because it names the parser functions after the rules. The graphical tools for building parsers are cool, except that many advanced things can only be done by adding actual code to the parser rules, which the graphical tool does not support (and how could it?) so you're back at square one.

Both ANTLR and Yacc are painful to work with. I ended up writing my own parser generator instead. So much better!

Is it open source?

Unfortunately not (did it working for a company).

Does that qualify as Yacc shaving?

Hahaha good one :-)

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