So you have to come up with a new scripting language or DSL for your company's latest superscale project!

Or scan thru this massive pile of legacy sources and (automatically) comment old APIs.

Or simply filter some language data and generate some statistics thereof - or translate to some other format ...

Or, or, or: Applications are numerous that can be solved with ANTLR4.

Hey, what about Flex & Bison? Yup, fair enough! Tools to torture cs students ...

ANTLR is the gentler approach to - sometimes - complex problems. Arguably it is the more modern tool. It combines lexer & parser in a single application, easy to understand yet enourmously flexible. Even better, thanks to LL(*) parsing it covers a broader range of grammars. Maybe an alternative for those pissed-off by table driven parser maintenance ...

With Python as the chosen target language, we'll cover (almost) all aspects of ANTLR4. Tutorials on various (if not all!) relevant aspects are provided as part of the belonging live coding session in this presentation. You'll also learn elegant ways to maintain custom code alongside generated one.

Prerequisite: Basic programming skills (Python recommended, but not strictly necessary) will suffice.

A general interest in language processing may help as well!

Presenter: Ivo Snett, hacKNology e.V.