Hi Ter, David and all,
Terence Parr wrote:
I started putting this LL(*) description in the upcoming ANTLR v3 book,
but decided it was beyond the scope of the reference guide so here it is
in the lookahead blog:
http://www.antlr.org/blog/antlr3/lookahead.tml
Not sure that it is useful to industry or academia because it is neither
practical, nor complete, nor rigorous. ;) Anyway, there you go.
I'm glad you took the time to describe the LL(*) algorithm in a more
organized fashion. Most of it seems pretty clear, and seems to work
well. I have only a small question on the termination conditions: you
wrote:
It turns out that the set of decisions for which ANTLR timed
out was the same as the set of non-LL(*) decisions for which ANTLR would
never be able to succeed anyway due to recursion occurring in more than
one alternative in a single decision.
What is a "recursion occurring in more than one alternative in a single
decision"? Does the absence of this recursion guarantee termination in
all cases, or did you keep a threshold for the (seemingly very rare)
undetected nonterminating cases?
On a different subject, David Mercer wrote:
In your last missive, you mentioned that you have had trouble getting
academic interest in your research. I've been meaning to ask ever since I
read that -- since I am not myself an academic and have little experience
publishing -- if anyone on this list knows the reason for this.
I can only talk of my own experience on this matter. I am under the
strong impression---after quite a few negative reviews recommending to
submit elsewhere, wherever elsewhere might be---that the major issue is
to find a conference/journal with people interested in parsing
techniques (for programming languages; natural languages are a different
story). Parsing is simply not a very active area of research any more,
and its small academic community does not weight much in the program
committees and editorial boards of the major conferences and journals
out there.
As an alternative, Terence, could you take out a patent on it?
Writing a book has the merit of potentially reaching a much larger public.
--
Cheers,
Sylvain
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