The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

Parser Generation in C#

One of the projects I'm working on requires parsing user input. http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/compilerconstruction.shtml is a list of parser generation tools that we are considering. GOLD and COCO/R are the current front runners. This is a Windows Forms App, so the generated code must be C#. Does anyone have experience, reccomendations or horror stories about GOLD, COCO/R or any of the others?

Hockey Player
Monday, August 30, 2004

I've used the Visual Parse++ product available here:

http://www.sand-stone.com/Visual Parse++.htm

in a couple projects in VB and was quite satisfied. They appear to offer .NET support in their product's latest version, so it might be worth checking out.

another parser
Monday, August 30, 2004

Sorry,

http://www.sand-stone.com/Visual%20Parse++.htm

another parser
Monday, August 30, 2004

I developed a fairly simple programming langauge for a college programming project using ANTLR ( http://www.antlr.org ). I had very few problems with its generated C# lexer and parser.

Gary
Monday, August 30, 2004

What kind of grammar do you need to parse? Is it LL, SLR, LALR, GLR, or can it be handled by a regular grammar (most kinds of user input are regular anyway)?

Also, some parser generators don't generate code and this might be more useful for you if you don't need to make revisions to the generated parser. Boost Spirit (for C++) is an LL parser generator like this.

Kalani
Monday, August 30, 2004