Date: Nov 6, 1999
From: Michael J. Wirthlin<wirthlin@ee.byu.edu>

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

We have found JTB to be a very useful and stable piece of software. This
software allows us to parse a specific file format (using a stable
grammer file) and provide several different parsing functions using
different visitor classes. We are using it for at least four different
grammers. 

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

We use JTB to parse and manipulate EDIF files and IBM .dot files. We
will likely use it for other formats as our needs arise.

   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). 

I would rate the tool at 8.

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

I have used JJTree and found it a bit combersome. I ran into JTB while
searching for a replacement to JJTree. I found it a bit awkward and
wasn't able to use the same grammer file for each use. 

   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. 



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

I would like the option of throwing an exception in the visitor class.
If the semantics are incorrect, it seems like an obvious place to throw
the exception. Now, I have to run a script to the visitor and node files
to add the throws statement. Could you add an option to support an
optional throws statement (i.e. throw ParseException).