Antlr is just another in a long line of lexical parsers.  I still remember the original lex (for lexical analysis), which in combination with yacc (for parsing and grammar) could make pretty much any conventional programming language.
Then GNU came up with Flex (fast lex) and Bison (instead of yacc...get it? :)
Then IDEs really started to take off and much of the ugly parts of writing languages disappeared, which led to all kinds of new tools like antlr.

But they all basically do the same thing: let one describe the syntax and grammar of (quasi) formal (programming) languages.

I don't know if any of them produce diagrams, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some did.

Cheers.
Fil

On 15 April 2011 09:42, Peter Frings <peter.frings@agfa.com> wrote:

On 15 Apr 2011, at 14:58, Christian Egli wrote:

> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> At FOSDEM, someone asked me if there was a formal description of the
>> structure of Org files, in some language that would be the input for a
>> parser (or parser generator?) so that Org file could be easily parsed.
>
> Maybe the person was talking about antlr[1], "ANother Tool for Language
> Recognition, a language tool that provides a framework for constructing
> recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical
> descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages”.
<snip>

> Sounds like an interesting project.

Wow, if that thing can export syntax diagrams in PNG or PDF I’d be really happy. Looks very interesting — albeit serious overkill for what I’d use it :-).

thanks,
Peter.
--
c++;         // this makes c bigger but returns the old value





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Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
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