Part of what I love about Java is the never-ending supply of libraries and tools available to the general development community.  For Flex Builder, we leverage Eclipse (obviously), ANTLR, Lucene, JFlex and a number of other libraries with great success.  Software engineers are lazy by nature (at least I am) and I know  I don’t want to write a parser by hand (or a search engine, or even a HashMap) There’s no point re-inventing the wheel when people who specialize in obscure areas of computer science have already done, most likely better than you could.  And for me, the real sign of a language’s maturity is the availability of high-quality tools and libraries.

AS3 is getting there (PaperVision comes to mind, among others) and I was very happy to stumble across another AS3 library in a place I wasn’t expecting.   Turns out, that with the new release of ANTLR, it’s possible to generate parser code targeted to different languages.  And one of the languages (in addition to Java, C++, C#, etc) is ActionScript 3.  In case you’ve never seen/heard of it, ANTLR is a parser/lexer generator that now supports LL(*) parsing.  If you’re thinking of building a parser in AS3, stop what you’re doing and try out ANTLR.  You’ll thank me because, honestly, who wants to write a parser by hand these days?

Alright, back to grammars…