ANTLR v3.2

September 22, 2009

Terence Parr
ANTLR project lead and supreme dictator for life
University of San Francisco
Credits

ANTLR v3.2 is a bug fix and feature release.

New features

• Added tree grammar filter=true mode. See Tree pattern matching
• Added misc.FastQueue and TestFastQueue: A queue that can dequeue and get(i) in O(1) and grow arbitrarily large. A linked list is fast at dequeue but slow at get(i). An array is the reverse. This is O(1) for both operations.
• Added tree.TreeIterator, a generator that walks a doubly-linked tree. The nodes must know what index they are. It's an Iterator but remove() is not supported. Returns navigation nodes always: UP, DOWN, EOF.
• Added misc.LookaheadStream: A lookahead queue that knows how to mark/release locations in the buffer for backtracking purposes. I hope to use for both tree nodes and tokens. Just implement nextElement() to say how to get next node or token.

Changes

• Added new options for tool invocation to control the points at which the code
  generator tells the target code to use its equivalent of switch() instead of
  inline ifs.

  -Xmaxswitchcaselabels m don't generate switch statements for dfas bigger than m [300]
  -Xminswitchalts m       don't generate switch statements for dfas smaller than m [3]
  

• Upgraded -X help output to include new options and provide the default settings, as well as provide units for those settings that need them.
• .g and .g3 file extensions work again.
• introduced bug in 3.1.3: gives exception not error msg upon missing .g file
• CommonTreeNodeStream -> BufferedTreeNodeStream. Now,
  CommonTreeNodeStream is completely unbuffered unless you are
  backtracking. No longer making a list of all nodes before tree parsing.

Java Target

• Added reset to TreeNodeStream interface.

C Target

• Change the C Target to overide the deafults for the new settings to generate the most optimizable C code from the modern C compiler point of view. This is essentially to always use swtich statements unless there is absolutely no other option. C defaults are to use 1 for minimum and 3000 for maximum number of alts that trigger switch(). This results in object code that is 30% smaller and up to 20% faster.

From bug tracking system

Java target

• ANTLR-374 invalid % syntax problem; not handling valid template syntax

C target

• ANTLR-399 C lexers do not count error messages
• ANTLR-398 Use of TokenLabelType in lexeres combined with labeled fragment rules