ANTLR

From Encoresoup - The Ultimate Guide to Free/Open Source Software

In computer based language recognition, ANother Tool for Language Recognition (ANTLR) is the name of a parser generator that uses LL(*) parsing. ANTLR is the successor to the Purdue Compiler Construction Tool Set (PCCTS), first developed in 1989, and is under active development. Its maintainer is professor Terence Parr of the University of San Francisco.

ANTLR rules are expressed in a format deliberately similar to EBNF instead of the regular expression syntax employed by other parser generators.

At the moment, ANTLR supports generating code in the following languages: C, C++, Java, Python, C#, Objective-C. ANTLR 3 is under a 3-clause BSD License.

For an introduction, see the ANTLR tutorial at the University of Birmingham. For background on the theory, see articles from the ANTLR pages, e.g. an ANTLR journal paper.

Several plugins have been developed for the Eclipse development environment to support the ANTLR grammar. There is ANTLR Studio, a proprietary product, as well as the ANTLR 2 and 3 plugins for Eclipse hosted on SourceForge.

[edit] See also

• JavaCC
• SableCC
• Coco/R
• Modular Syntax Definition Formalism

[edit] External links

• ANTLR
• ANTLRWorks
• ANTLR Studio
• ANTLR For Delphi Target
• The Definitive ANTLR Reference, a extensive manual for ANTLR written by Parr