Understanding ANTLREdit
In order to fully understand ANTLR you need to master the following topics. Total mastery of all topics is not always necessary to build a working parser, but without it is very easy to build a non-working one, or fail to even build one at all.
- How to write rules using ANTLR’s extended BNF notation (by far the easiest topic)
- What are the differences between lexers, parsers and tree parsers
- How ANTLR-generated recognizers work at runtime; and as sub-topics:
- How ANTLR-generated recognizers use prediction
- The role of predicates (these seem simple at first but predicates can wind up in other rules’ decision making logic and so the inter-rule interactions can be very, very complex)
- "First" and "follow" sets
- How ANTLR performs analysis of a grammar