Building a Custom Language for Map Games with ANTLR
Designing a declarative DSL compiler and execution harness for spatial map games using ANTLR grammars, Next.js web interfaces, and Python runtime parsers.
Building a Custom Language for Map Games with ANTLR
As a computer science student, I’ve found language creation to be a fascinating area. I’ve learned about using ANTLR to build custom languages. A few months into my master’s program, I’m excited to share one of the most engaging projects I’ve worked on with my classmates: creating our own language designed specifically for building map games!
Diving into ANTLR for Language Development
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a tool that makes it easier to create parsers and lexers for custom programming languages. It lets developers define grammars in a simple way, and then it generates code that can understand complex text inputs.
The first thing you do with ANTLR is make a grammar file, usually with a .g4 extension, where you describe the language's structure. For instance, you can set up a basic math grammar to recognize things like addition and multiplication.
Here’s how I've experimented with building a mini language using ANTLR in my classes:
- Defining Grammar: I started by setting up the rules for the language, detailing how expressions are put together and how different types of data are managed.
- Generating Code: ANTLR is used to create the parser code needed, which I could add to my applications. The tool will be needed just by you, the language engineer, while the runtime will be included in the final software created by you. The tool is always the same no matter which language you are targeting.
- Building an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST): The parser’s output is often an AST, which shows the syntactical structure of the code. This tree can be used for interpretation or compilation.
Using ANTLR made the development process smoother and let me concentrate on designing the language instead of getting caught up in the details of parsing.
Our project features a basic IDE and an intuitive UI built with Next.js, along with a Python-based backend service that hosts the language’s parser/compiler. It’s been an incredible experience bringing this idea to life, and I’m excited to see where it takes us!