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ANTLR - ANother Tool for Language Recognition - is a tool that is used in the construction of formal language software tools (or just language tools) such as translators, compilers, recognizers and, static/dynamic program analyzers. Developers use ANTLR to reduce the time and effort needed to build and maintain language processing tools. In common terminology, ANTLR is a compiler generator or compiler compiler (in the tradition of tools such as Lex/Flex and Yacc/Bison) and it is used to generate the source code for language recognizers, analyzers and translators from language specifications. ANTLR takes as it's its input a grammar - a precise description of a language augmented with semantic actions - and generates source code files and other auxiliary files. The target language of the generated source code (e.g. Java, C/C++, C#, Python, Ruby) is specified in the grammar.
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ANTLR 3 is the latest version of a language processing toolkit that was originally released as PCCTS in the mid-1990s. As was the case then, this release of the ANTLR toolkit advances the state of the art with it's its new LL
parsing engine. ANTLR provides a framework for the generation of recognizers, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions. ANTLR grammatical descriptions can optionally include action code written in what is termed the target language (i.e. the implementation language of the source code artifacts generated by ANTLR).
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Because it can save you time and resources by automating significant portions of the effort involved in building language processing tools. It is well established that generative tools such as compiler compilers have a major, positive impact on developer productivity. In addition, many of ANTLR v3's new features including an improved analysis engine, it's its significantly enhanced parsing strength via LL parsing with arbitrary lookahead, it's its vastly improved tree construction rewrite rules and the availability of the simply fantastic AntlrWorks IDE offers productivity benefits over other comparable generative language processing toolkits.
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