Comment Re:Good stuff... (Score 1) 95
..problem is, you can't really do anything non-trivial in ANTLR 3.0 without buying the book.
They've drastically reduced the freely available documentation on their web page, so you are essentially forced to buy it.
I don't know where you get that idea from, other than a few idiot postings on the ANTLR mailing list perhaps, or maybe you were one of those and are just trolling.
Anyway, it is bollocks - you think anyone working for free on a free open source project can be bothered to go DELETE documentation?
Nothing has ever been removed from the web site unless it was wrong, example grammars are all over the place and there is a wiki that tells you how to do anything the book does and is added to pretty regularly. The book is just more organized and easier to follow. It seems that the price for book form documentation is reasonable for completely free (BSD) software and you don't even HAVE to buy it. The time investment writing a large grammar is quite a big investment and unless you get paid less than 50 cents an hour, or can instantly write complex grammars in less than an hour, then forty some bucks is a bargain.
Of course, there are plenty of people that think a parser generation tool should write their code for them, but parsing anything of any size (syntax wise) isn't a trivial exercise. If you can't get going with the example grammars and the wiki, you should probably consider letting someone else do the work.