Steve Ebersole, I've been working on this for a while, but until now had only committed the parser change. You can see my current WIP here: https://github.com/marcus-nl/hibernate-orm/commit/26314164f1c65792fa9359f7f5f65611306536a4 . I think it's about 80% functional (but you know what they say about the remaining 20%... ).