antlr3-atsections - Man Page

Java targeted grammars allow the special section @init to be placed after the declaration of a rule (lexer, parser and tree parser rules). This allows you to both declare and initialize variables that are local to the code generated for that rule. You can then reference them within your rule action code.

With the C target, the generated code is subject to the restrictions of C semantics and this means that you must declare any local variables, then assign to them afterwards. As well as the @init section, which C programmers should use to initialize their local variables, the C target provides the @declarations section, which is also a rule based section. This section is where the C programmer should declare the local variables, thus separating their declaration from their initialization. Here is an example:

translation_unit
@declarations
{
    pANTLR3_BOOLEAN hasUsing;
}
@init
{

    // Assume no Using directives
    //
    hasUsing = ANTLR3_FALSE;

}
    : rulea ruleb ...

Using the @declarations and @init sections guarantees that your generated code will compile correctly on any standard C compiler (assuming, of course, that you type in valid C code.)

The @parser::header or @lexer::header annotations cause the code they encapsulate to be placed at the start of each generated file, regardless of whether it is a .c or .h file. This can be useful for inserting copyright information and so on in all your generated files.

\bNOTE: Be careful not to confuse this concept with placing code in the generated .h header file. The name choice is unfortunate, but was already used in the Java target to allow the placement of imports statements in generated java classes. We have therefore kept the intent of this section the same.

Here is an example:

@lexer::header
{
  // Copyright (c) Jim Idle 2007 - All your grammar are belong to us.
}

@parser::header
{
  // Copyright (c) Jim Idle 2007 - All your grammar are belong to us.
}

The @parser::includes or @lexer::includes annotations cause the code they encapsulate to be placed in the generated .h file, after the standard includes required by the ANTLR generated code.

Here you could for instance place a #include statement to cause your grammar code to include some standard definitions. Because you may use multiple parsers and lexers in your solution, you should probably not place #define statements here, but in the @postinclude section. Then you may create different #defines for different recognizers.

Here is an example:

@lexer::includes
{
  #include "myprojectcommondefs.h"
}

@parser::includes
{
  #include "myprojectcommondefs.h"
}

The @parser::preincludes or @lexer::preincludes annotations cause the code they encapsulate to be placed in the generated .h file, before the standard includes required by the ANTLR generated code.

You should use this section when you wish to place #defines and other definitions in the code before the standard ANTLR runtime includes defined them. This allows you to override any predefined symbols and options that the includes otherwise take defaults for. For instance, if you have built a version of the runtime with a special version of malloc, you can #define #ANTLR3_MALLOC to match the definition you used for the ANTLR runtime library.

The @parser::postinclude or @lexer::postinclude annotations cause the code they encapsulate to be placed in the generated .C file, after the generated include file (which includes the standard ANTLR3C library includes.

Code you place here then will be subject to any macros defined by your own includes, by the generated include and by the standard ANTLR3 includes. This is a good place to #undef anything that you don;t like the default values of, but cannot override before the includes define them.

This is also a good place to #define any macros you may wish to use in the generated .c file. As you can include multiple parsers in your projects, you will need to include the generated .h file of each of them, possibly globally, but almost certainly in a context where you are including more than one .h file simultaneously. Hence if you commonly use the same macro names for accessing structures and so on, and they change from grammar to grammar, you should define them here to avoid creating conflicting definitions in the header files.