January 2013
Intermediate to advanced
328 pages
8h 5m
English
Content preview from The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Using Existing Grammars as a Guide
Having access to existing grammar in non-ANTLR format is a great way to figure out how somebody else decided to break down the phrases in a language. At the very least, an existing grammar gives us a nice list of rule names to use as a guide. A word of caution, though. I recommend against cutting and pasting a grammar from a reference manual into ANTLR and massaging it until it works. Treat it as a guide rather than a piece of code.
Reference manuals are often pretty loose for grammar clarity reasons, meaning that the grammar recognizes lots of sentences not in the language. Or, the grammar might be ambiguous, able to match the same input sequence in more than one way. For example, a grammar might say that ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.