Talk:Markup spec/ANTLR

A couple of comments on the "bad" parts:

'> ANTLR doesn't yet render to PHP. ... Supposedly it is about a week's work for someone well versed in PHP.'

Even for someone well versed in ANTLR and PHP would have a hard time doing this in a week, IMO.

'> ... It's certainly huge though. Best not to look at it before breakfast.'

Yes, the generated source files can become large (given a complex enough grammar). But as with many generated source files, you're not really supposed to look at it, simply edit the grammar and regenerate lexer and parser source files.

'> ANTLR is buggy. I think many of the bugs I've seen are really ANTLRworks (the IDE) bugs, rather than ANTLR itself.'

Of course ANTLR has bugs in it (which software doesn't?) but chances are that the things you ran into, originated in ANTLRWorks (which has quite a few). Also note that ANTLRWorks does not support certain features in a grammar file: semantic- or syntactic predicates, for example. So when you have a predicate in your grammar, and then try to interpret some input-source with ANTLRWorks, you will probably see something happening that you didn't expect. If you chuck those under the numerator "bugs", then yeah, ANTLR has many, many bugs in it! :)