What's the best tool for generating a parser in Java for my own language grammar?

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+2 Q:

What's the best tool for generating a parser in Java for my own language grammar?

I'm developing a small programming language based mostly of the C99 standard and I've already written a fairly decent lexer in java and now I'm looking to generate a Java Parser from the grammar. I know there's Bison, but that seems to only generate C code. I'm looking for a application that will allow me to input my grammar and create a full parser class in java code. Reading other SO posts on related topics, I've found ANTLR, but I'm wondering if anyone in the SO knows about a better tool?

thanks!

+3 A:

Another couple to look at are JavaCC and SableCC (it has been a long time since I looked at SableCC).

TofuBeer 2009-03-30 06:30:03

+1 for JavaCC. It's been years since I used it but found it orders of magnitude easier than lex + yacc

MrWiggles 2009-03-30 08:04:44

I checked out JavaCC, but I'm not sure how it compares to ANTLR? What are the differences between the two? Is one simpler than the other and how?

Yoely 2009-03-30 15:03:18

It has been too long since I used JavaCC and I haven't used ANTLR enough to make a really fair comparison. This might help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/382211/whats-better-antlr-or-javacc

TofuBeer 2009-03-30 19:18:31

+2 A:

I've been quite impressed by BNFC, which is able to generate parsers in Java as well as in C, C++, C#, F#, Haskell, and OCaml.

Ray Myers 2009-03-30 07:25:36

The JFlex home page at http://jflex.de indicates where to find Bison-like tools that can target Java:

http://byaccj.sourceforge.net/ http://www2.cs.tum.edu/projects/cup/ http://www.antlr.org/

QuickRecipesOnSymbianOS 2009-03-30 13:51:57

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What's the best tool for generating a parser in Java for my own language grammar?

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