SyntaxEditor for WPF has a free add-on included with it that provides integration with ANTLR 3.4 parsers. The add-on is described in detail in this blog post from several years back.

What is ANTLR?

ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, was created by Terence Parr and is one of the most widely-used parsing frameworks available.  ANTLR is a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.

SyntaxEditor for WPF customers know that we also have our own LL(*) Parsing Framework that has a lot of benefits over ANTLR, but due to the general popularity of ANTLR, we are pleased to support it as well.

ANTLR v4

In the past few months, ANTLR v4 was released.  There is updated tooling for Visual Studio that allows ANTLR v4 parsers to generated.  The thing is that the entire infrastructure of ANTLR parsers has changed in v4, and with those breaking changes, it prevents our add-on from working.

In ANTLR v3, you could run the parser on the document text via our add-on (and in a worker thread so it doesn't block the main UI thread), and it would return the AST results of the parsing operation asynchronously when it completed.

In ANTLR v4, the parser is not the same as there is no automatic AST generation.  Parse results can be examined via the use of the visitor pattern or a parse tree walker.  If you wish to have your own AST, you have to roll your own and construct it using a visitor or walker.  This change negates a lot of the features our add-on provided since now, you basically must hand code an IParser service to install on your language.  SyntaxEditor is fully extensible for any custom parsers, so this can be added easily.  It's just that whatever code you need to do to generate an AST or other parse data by walking the parse tree must now be custom written.

What Do You Want?

We are writing this blog post to see what you, our customers, would like to see from us in terms of ANTLR support.  Do you still wish to have our add-on support ANTLR v3 as we move forward? 

The only piece that is really useful from our ANTLR add-on when used with the newer v4 design is the ICharStream implementation that allows the parser to directly read from our text storage facility.  Since it's only one class, do we just include it open source somewhere or make a separate v4 binary with it in there?

We'd love to hear your thoughts… Please comment below or email our support address!

Earlier last year we added delimiter auto-complete features to SyntaxEditor.  Delimiter auto-complete is where the user types a start delimiter and a related end delimiter is auto-inserted after the caret.  This is especially helpful when working on mobile tablets like a Surface since it means less overall typing is required to output the same code.  Best of all, with SyntaxEditor, these features can be easily added to any custom language.

Today I'd like to announce that we have rewritten and made improvements to the internal logic used to track delimiter auto-completions.  This means that as an end user encounters an already-completed delimiter, SyntaxEditor is more intelligent about how to handle various text change operations.

Example 1

Lets check out some of the enhancements.  We'll type in some JavaScript:

In the screenshot above, the ) character was auto-completed when the ( character was typed.  Now let's type in some parameters:

Next we will type the ) character even though it already exists in the document.  SyntaxEditor intelligently knows that the ) was previously auto-completed so it moves the caret past it without entering a second ):

This sort of functionality works in the current SyntaxEditor version however only if there was nothing typed between the delimiters.  In the above scenario with the current version, since we typed in some parameter names, a second ) would have been typed.  With the most recently logic updates, SyntaxEditor now handles real-world scenarios much better.

Example 2

Let's start over to show another nice feature.  Here we've again typed a function and some parameters.  Note that the end ) was auto-completed while typing out the text so it appears after the caret.

If we Backspace over the text and get to the start ( character, upon Backspacing over that, the related end-delimiter is automatically removed too:

This feature works in the current version as well but again, only if there was nothing typed between the delimiters.  With the code updates, SyntaxEditor handles many more scenarios of typing within delimiters, and even multiple nestings of delimiters!

Summary

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of SyntaxEditor, in the WPF, WinRT/XAML, and Silverlight platforms, and will also appear in the next version of our free Code Writer Windows 8 app.

WPF Controls 2013.2 build 592 has been released and is now available for download.  This build focuses on numerous enhancements and bug fixes.  While many updates were made, major ones are listed below.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

• Added the ability to alter the label positioning mode algorithm for a series.

• Improved support for high DPI scenarios.
• Improved support for highlighting tabs when interop controls get focus.

• Added support for the Metro Dark theme.

• Added a new Property Dialog QuickStart that shows how to display a dialog from a property editor.

• Added the ability to edit multiple lines of text at the same time when block selection is active.
• Added incremental search features.
• Added the ability to highlight search match results within a view.
• Added support for alpha-blended foreground/background style colors.
• .NET Languages Add-on - Added a 'deprecated' quick info note on types/members flagged as Obsolete.

• Improved WindowChrome (and RibbonWindow) rendering in various scenarios.

WinRT XAML Controls 2013.2 build 131 has been released and is now available for download.  This build focuses on numerous enhancements and bug fixes.  While many updates were made, major ones are listed below.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

• Added the ability to alter the label positioning mode algorithm for a series.

• Added the ability to edit multiple lines of text at the same time when block selection is active.
• Added incremental search features.
• Added the ability to highlight search match results within a view.
• Added support for alpha-blended foreground/background style colors.
• .NET Languages Add-on - Added a 'deprecated' quick info note on types/members flagged as Obsolete.

Silverlight Controls 2013.2 build 162 has been released and is now available for download.  This build focuses on numerous enhancements and bug fixes.  While many updates were made, major ones are listed below.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

• Added the ability to alter the label positioning mode algorithm for a series.

• Added the ability to edit multiple lines of text at the same time when block selection is active.
• Added incremental search features.
• Added the ability to highlight search match results within a view.
• Added support for alpha-blended foreground/background style colors.
• .NET Languages Add-on - Added a 'deprecated' quick info note on types/members flagged as Obsolete.