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ANTLR – ANother Tool for Language Recognition – is a tool that helps you to build and maintain language processing software systems tools more quickly and easily. It does this by generating source code for inclusion in these systems tools from language specifications that you supply. In common terminology, ANTLR is a compiler generator or compiler compiler in the tradition of tools such as Lex/Flex and Yacc/Bison). ANTLR takes as it's input a grammar - which is a precise description of a language augmented with semantic actions - and generates a number of files including source code files for the target language (e.g. Java, C/C++, C#, Python, Ruby) that is specified in the grammar.
Developers Software developers can use ANTLR to implement reduce their workload when implementing Domain-Specific Languages or, to write build parts of language compilers and translators, and or even to help them build tools that parse complex XML.
As stated above, ANTLR 3 can generate the source code for various tools that can be used to analyze and transform input in the language defined by the input grammar. The basic types of language processing tools that ANTLR can generates are Lexers (a.k.a scanners, tokenizers), Parsers and TreeParsers (a.k.a tree walkers, c.f. visitors).
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