Status concerning Semantic Parsing

Hi Martin,

Actually our free ANTLR add-on has been out for a while now. See this blog post from several months ago:
http://blog.actiprosoftware.com/post.aspx?id=2aad17b9-2dff-48be-8139-f7b32dd8cf63

It makes it super easy to integrate with ANTLR's parser using our multi-threaded parsing framework and the AST data is returned to the document's ParseData property.

Note that while we do integrate with the parser, ANTLR's lexer doesn't support incremental lexing (picking up in the middle of a document). We discussed this with Terrence Parr. So you'd still have to make a lexer for your language using either a language definition or a programmatic lexer to achieve syntax highlighting. But our latest versions have a helpful Language Designer app that help you build these things.

You may want to hold off on updating though since we have a very major new version coming out any day now in WPF Studio 2009.2. Tons of new SyntaxEditor features are coming.

Thank you.

We probably will start when version .2 is launched.

In our current SE we do use Antlr for both lexer and parser, with Syntax-highlighting. In the lexer we just parse the remaining text. We instantiate a new lexer, which is a bit expensive, but works.

In the parser we create ASTnodes from the generated Antlr tree.

So for us the new WPF SE will give us an improvement in speed as well.

Regards
Martin

Hi Martin,

Version 2009.2 came out yesterday. We'd love to discuss offline more about how you were using ANTLR as a lexer since Terrence had said incremental lexing wasn't fully supported. Perhaps in certain scenarios it would work though. Please email us if you'd like to discuss that more.