Introduction

ANTLR v3 is a complete rewrite of the ANTLR parser generator and is the culmination of over 15 years of experience building language tools. The software represents nearly four years of frantic coding and research effort. While there are significant enhancements based upon new and exciting research, the tool should feel very familiar to ANTLR v2 users. The ANTLR v3 software license is BSD.

The Definitive ANTLR Reference: Building domain-specific languages Terence's ANTLR v3 book coming out in Early May, 2007. You can buy the PDF of it now. ANTLR v3 will ship before the book is printed.

The core tool is written by Terence Parr, the maniac behind the previous two versions, with code generation targets written by a variety of other folks (see the target list below). The goal of version 3 was to provide a really clean source base and to significantly clean-up the syntax and semantics of the meta-language. Along the way, some nice new technology was discovered thanks to discussions with the usual suspects: Loring Craymer, Ric Klaren, John Mitchell, Sriram Srinivasan, Monty Zukowski, and many many others from the antlr-interest mailing and the 2004, 2005 workshops. Jean Bovet has also proven an excellent research colleague and developer. His ANTLRWorks development environment rocks!

From the user perspective, they are two primary new features: significantly enhanced parsing strength via LL(*) parsing with arbitrary lookahead and vastly improved tree construction rewrite rules. Here is a look at a simple grammar:

grammar SimpleParser;
program : variable* method+ ;
variable: 'int' ID ('=' expr)? ';' ;
method  : 'method' ID '(' ')'
  '{'
      variable* statement+
  '}'
;
statement
  : ID '=' expr ';'
  | 'return' expr ';'
  ;
expr    : ID | INT ;
ID      : ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z')+ ;
INT     : '0'..'9'+ ;
WS      : (' '|'\t'|'\n')+ {channel=99;}
;

To get started, please see the ANTLR v3 README file.

Here is an ANTLR v2 to v3 converter (in progress; send me fixes!).

LL(*) Parsing

func : type ID '(' arg* ')' ';'
     | type ID '(' arg* ')' '{' body '}'
     ;

Tree construction rewrite rules

variable
    :   type declarator ';' -> ^(VAR_DEF type declarator)
    ;

functionHeader
    :   type ID '(' ( formalParameter ( ',' formalParameter )* )? ')'
        -> ^(FUNC_HDR type ID formalParameter+)
    ;

atom
    :  ...
    |  '(' expr ')' -> expr
    ;

Status

Here is the list of known ANTLR v3 bugs and feature requests.

Download

ANTLR v3 source repository browsing using FishEye brought to you by Cenqua. You can get up-to-the-second development tarballs here.

ANTLR v2 to v3 converter (in progress; send me fixes!)

ANTLR 3.0 beta 7 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 6 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 5 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 4 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 3 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 2 source release
ANTLR 3.0 beta 1 source release
ANTLR 3.0 early access 10 source release
ANTLR 3.0 early access 9 source release
ANTLR 3.0 early access 8 source release
ANTLR 3.0 early access 7 source release

Software license

Examples

LL-star, cminus, dynamic-scope, fuzzy, hoistedPredicates, island-grammar, java, java-from-v2, python, scopes, simplecTreeParser, treeparser, tweak, xmlLexer.

Also check out Mantra Programming Language for a prototype (work in progress) using v3.

ANTLRWorks development environment

ANTLRWorks Grammar Development Environment for v3

Code generation targets

Check out the wiki: ANTLR v3 code generation targets.

Here is the ANTLR v3 core code generation template interface specification. It gives you an idea of the templates required to build a target for v3.

Documentation, info...

Here is start of the ANTLR v3 documentation.

See the wiki ANTLR v3 FAQ.

ANTLR v3 Overview [ppt]; mp3 (40M and cut off a bit)
LL(*) Parsing Algorithm used by v3 [ppt].
Semantic predicate hoisting [ppt].

Bugs

Submit bugs to the antlr-interest list first for triage. I'll pick it up. Here is the official ANTLR v3 bug management system brought to you by the great folks at Atlassian Blogs