Saturday, January 05, 2008

Language Recognition

A friend recently had to work with expressions, and he was looking around for some existing libraries which would let him do this. That's when he found ANTLR (http://www.antlr.org).

From the website :

ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.

I tried to work with it ANTLR today and I think it is pretty good. One good thing about it is that it also has a GUI to write the grammar, once your grammar is ready, you can generate code in a number of languages.

My primary development language is C# so I was very happy to see that they have also explained how to tweak .csproj and compile the grammar in a visual studio project.

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