This is actually the first time I've even heard of ANTLR, which came about in the early 90's. But yacc/lex/vi/emacs, et al have been around since the 70's. The emacs vs. vi holy war was pretty much instant, but doomed every time one spoke of headless devices such as routers.
Antlr and LL(k) parsers in general are great when they fit the grammar you want to make well. I remember discovering it when it was called JavaCC a nod to yacc.
Heh. at my grad school we had a pccts fan (antlr before java even existed) and he actually tried to paint the LR vs LL war as a american vs european thing (this was in france).
