Most compilers treat comments as just another meaningless whitespaces. They identify them in the source code and then throw them away. On the other hand, things are a bit harder if you need to know comments content and their position.
Such requirement is not too common and official ANTLR documentation does not says much about how to do it. The compiler we have been working on needed to preserve comments, so we had to come up with our own solution. This post documents it.
First chapter introduces our compiler. It describes what it does, where it is located and how it is written. Second chapter explains our comment preserving requirements. The rest of the post describes datastructures and algorithms used in our solution.
Such requirement is not too common and official ANTLR documentation does not says much about how to do it. The compiler we have been working on needed to preserve comments, so we had to come up with our own solution. This post documents it.
First chapter introduces our compiler. It describes what it does, where it is located and how it is written. Second chapter explains our comment preserving requirements. The rest of the post describes datastructures and algorithms used in our solution.
