Re: Anything better than lex & yacc? Everyone still using those?

On 30 Jun 2000 00:55:10 -0400, Tuukka Tikkanen <spamtrap@tic0.net> wrote:
>Are lex and yacc (or flex and bison, if you prefer) still the only
>practical tools to go about making lexers and parsers? After searching
>the net for other resources, all I could come up with was PCCTS, but
>it appears to be - how should I put it - well, not so maintained
>anymore with only maintenance releases coming with no new features in
>works. Besides the distribution coming in zip file and seems to lack
>makefiles for real OSes having only visual studio project files. That
>leads me to conclusion, that there are extremely few unix users of
>this package - so there wouldn't be any real user base to consult in


I think you've misjudged PCCTS. You've gotten ahold of a some package
that apparently didn't have the unix stuff. I've used PCCTS for a
couple of projects using linux as the development platform. I found
it to be preferable to using lex/yacc. Don't be put off by the zip
file!


While it's true that the changes to PCCTS are mainly maintenance ones,
the successor to PCCTS, ANTLR is being actively developed. ANTLR
supports both java and C++ code generation. It would seem to meet
most of the needs you've specified.


You might want to check out comp.compilers.tools.pccts to get a better
idea of the size of the user base. Most of the users are using ANTLR
rather than PCCTS.


Isaac

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