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Larry O’Brien: Fun With Compilers...Really


By Larry O'Brien
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September 1, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
I used to think that writing a compiler was the most fun you could have programming. I now amend that. Writing a unit-tested compiler is the most fun you can have programming.

Compilers and translators are not very commonly required to solve business needs, but not every data-source produces library-parsable XML, and the tools needed to transform structured-but-untagged data are the same ones that are used to emit code. And while the topic of parsing text is deep enough to warrant thick books, the types of input that a business developer is likely to face are usually easily tackled with modern tools. When a translation or code-generation problem arises in discussion, your pulse should quicken from excitement rather than fear.

I think the best modern tool for parsing is ANTLR (www.antlr.org), recently updated to a long-awaited third version. ANTLR is a long-term project from the University of San Francisco’s Terence Parr and can handle most any grammar thrown at it (technically, it generates arbitrarily deep LL look-aheads and memorizes them for performance in a packrat-like manner). ANTLR has a fantastic IDE called ANTLRWorks (developed primarily by Jean Bovet) and a text-generation library called StringTemplate. Each component has a learning curve, and the overall system is complex enough that even the most bold would be wise to work their way through the time-honored four-function calculator example. This “Hello, World” of parsing is used in Parr’s new book “The Definitive ANTLR Reference,” published by The Pragmatic Programmers, and unequivocally necessary as a supplement to the ANTLR documentation and wiki.

Although I’ve used ANTLR in the past, only with the new release have I used it to tackle a production problem—handling a quite complex mainframe output with decades of accreted special-case quirks and codes. As is not uncommon, my clients felt locked in to a supplier who charged them tens of thousands in annual license fees, confident that no one would breach the barrier to entry of parsing the mainframe data. When client discussions involve people saying things like “If you look at line 429,327, you’ll see an example of the problem,” such confidence might have been justified in the past.




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