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This month's OCI Java News Brief (JNB) article is out. In this article, Mark Volkmann continues his effort in getting proficient with ANTLR 3.0. (Actually, you need ANTLR 3.1b1 to compile the grammars in the article.)

Mark Volkmann:

ANTLR 3.0

by
R. Mark Volkmann, Partner/Software Engineer
Object Computing, Inc. (OCI)

Table of Contents

Part I - Overview Introduction To ANTLR ANTLR Overview Use Cases Other DSL Approaches Definitions General Steps Part II - Jumping In Example Description Important Classes Grammar Syntax Grammar Options Grammar Actions Part III - Lexers Lexer Rules Whitespace and Comments Our Lexer Grammar

Part IV - Parsers Token Specifications Rule Syntax Creating ASTs Rule Arguments and Return Values Our Parser Grammar Part V - Tree Parsers Rule Actions Attribute Scopes Our Tree Grammar Part VI - ANTLRWorks Part VII - Putting It All Together Using Generated Classes Ant Tips Part VIII - Wrap Up Hidden Tokens Advanced Topics Projects Using ANLTR Books Summary References

As always with JNB articles, this one is intended for you to follow along. So download ANTLR 3.1b1, fire up your bash and vim, and learn some language recognition tricks.

On a related note, Martin Fowler recently blogged about a phenomenon he calls Parser Fear:

Martin Fowler: I talk quite a bit with people about DomainSpecificLanguages these days and a common reaction I get to external DSLs is that it's hard to write a parser.

He went on to say that creating an external DSL with ANTLR is just as fast as using XML files, where supposedly you get the parser for free.