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Re: SableCC vs. Antlr?



I just wanted to put some relativity into some claims...  It really
depends what you do with the tools;-)  See below.

fidel viegas wrote:
> At the moment the drawbacks are the following:
> 
> 1)Generation of efficient compilers such as the ones
> generated by JavaCC, Antlr or CUP.

This is all relative.  You have to compare a JavaCC/Antlr lexer/parser
that also builds an AST, with nodes for every token, including
"comments", to SableCC.  Then you might see that the difference in
efficiency is not so big.  [Has anybody actually done such a
comparison?]

Also, SableCC guarantees scanning/parsing in O(souce code length + AST
size).  If you use some of the features of JavaCC/Antlr, you can
generate code with worst case exponential complexity!  (Although, this
ignores the constant factors which might be a little higher in SableCC).

Etienne
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Etienne M. Gagnon, M.Sc.                     e-mail: egagnon@j-meg.com
Author of SableCC:                             http://www.sablecc.org/
and SableVM:                                   http://www.sablevm.org/