Great Nerd Stim!

Writing a parser represents a kind of trophy achievement in programming, in my opinion. For years, it meant using very quirky tools such as yacc, and (later) bison. In the last few years, however, a new generation of parser generators has emerged that have eased the task considerably. Among those are CUP and JavaCC.

No tool, however, has generated more excitement than ANTLR, which is celebrated by its users for its ease of use and its ability to generate parsers in several languages. The ANTLR site has plenty of info on how to use it, but there has long been an unfilled need for a book you can bring with you to read on a long flight (and imagine the cool languages you could write, which is the real the nerd-stim).

This month, however, the pragmatic programmers filled that gap with a new book, The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building Domain-Specific Languages . It a very readable intro to writing parsers in general, and specifically to writing ANTLR-usable language specifications. Normally, such books are long, dry, pedantic ordeals that force you to write many small tests versions before you understand enough theory to start the actual work you want to do. This book takes away much of that drudgery and makes the topic truly approachable. Actually, it sort of lulls you into the false belief that you could write a new scripting language fairly easily. Writing and implementing language specs is still not easy, but with this book and ANTLR software, it's easier than it's ever been.