From:	Carlos Rueda <carueda@manizales.autonoma.edu.co>
Date:	Mon, 17 May 1999 16:21

1. Please provide a short description of JTB as a recommendation to
someone who has never seen or used it before. 

A very simple tool for AST creation and a means to practicing the
visitor design pattern.

2. How would you classify your use of JTB?  What kind of work are you
doing or have you done using JTB? 

In a new object oriented language for academic purposes, but only for
testing --my project is now in an advanced stage with "manual" tree 
generation.


3. What is your opinion on JTB?  Did you find the tool useful?  Please
rate it on a scale from 1 to 10 (worst to best). 

8

4. Have you used other similar tools such as JJTree or ANTLR 
(specifically, the tree-building aspect of it)? 

JJTree.

5. If you answered yes to number 4, how would you compare JTB with these
other tools?  Again, please rate it from 1 to 10 in comparison and 
include anything you have to say, including comments on ease of use, 
learning curve, etc. 

JJTree allows some savings in the tree nesting. In general, I found 
automatic parse tree generators very cumbersome. I prefer to write the
tree by myself (inside JavaCC source). This allows clean field reference
in semantic actions and it is more efficient.

6. Please include below any other comments you have regarding JTB.  Feel
free to include any suggestions for improvement. 

I am not an expert but feel that tree generators are only important if
you have a "permanently changing grammar" and have not properly designed
yourproject (or simply are just making a prototype); JJtree was only 
used in a preliminary version of my project but soon I realize it takes 
too time to write the semantic actions and the resulting code is not
clean. This same has happened with JTB. Any guideness in your 
documentation regarding advantages and disadvantages in using this kind 
of tools will be greatly appreciated.