ANTLR - Grammar language

ANTLR is an open source grammar language created in 1992 by Terence Parr.

#124on PLDB

32Years Old

1kRepos

In computer-based language recognition, ANTLR (pronounced Antler), or Another Tool For Language Recognition, is a parser generator that uses LL(*) for parsing. ANTLR is the successor to the Purdue Compiler Construction Tool Set (PCCTS), first developed in 1989, and is under active development. Its maintainer is Professor Terence Parr of the University of San Francisco.. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: grammarLanguage
There are at least 1,415 ANTLR repos on GitHub
Early development of ANTLR happened in University of San Francisco
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 3k users using ANTLR in 3k repos on GitHub
Explore ANTLR snippets on Rosetta Code
ANTLR on HOPL
ANTLR grammar for ANTLR
Pygments supports syntax highlighting for ANTLR
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for ANTLR
Indeed.com has 7 matches for "antlr engineer".
antlr.org was registered in 1997
See also: (18 related languages) Java, ActionScript, C, C#, JavaScript, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Ruby, Standard ML, Swift, Go, Groovy, Jython, Processing, Coco/R, JavaCC, PEG
5 PLDB concepts link to ANTLR: lllpg, Megaparsec, Parsers, Particles, Scroll

Example from the web:

/** Taken from "The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference" by Terence Parr */
// Derived from http://json.org
grammar JSON;
json
   : value
   ;
obj
   : '{' pair (',' pair)* '}'
   | '{' '}'
   ;
pair
   : STRING ':' value
   ;
arr
   : '[' value (',' value)* ']'
   | '[' ']'
   ;
value
   : STRING
   | NUMBER
   | obj
   | arr
   | 'true'
   | 'false'
   | 'null'
   ;

STRING
   : '"' (ESC | SAFECODEPOINT)* '"'
   ;

fragment ESC
   : '\\' (["\\/bfnrt] | UNICODE)
   ;
fragment UNICODE
   : 'u' HEX HEX HEX HEX
   ;
fragment HEX
   : [0-9a-fA-F]
   ;
fragment SAFECODEPOINT
   : ~ ["\\\u0000-\u001F]
   ;

NUMBER
   : '-'? INT ('.' [0-9] +)? EXP?
   ;

fragment INT
   : '0' | [1-9] [0-9]*
   ;

// no leading zeros

fragment EXP
   : [Ee] [+\-]? INT
   ;

// \- since - means "range" inside [...]

WS
   : [ \t\n\r] + -> skip
   ;

Example from Wikipedia:

TextReader reader;
 // (...) Fill TextReader with character
 SumLexer lexer = new SumLexer(reader);
 SumParser parser = new SumParser(lexer);

 parser.expression();

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Booleans	✓		true false
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* A comment */	/* */
Comments	✓	// A comment
Line Comments	✓	// A comment	//
Semantic Indentation	X