Thread-safety, lex and yacc.

Nicholas Dronen <ndronen@io.frii.com>
31 Mar 2001 02:35:00 -0500

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Related articles
Thread-safety, lex and yacc. ndronen@io.frii.com (Nicholas Dronen) (2001-03-31)
Re: Thread-safety, lex and yacc. olsenc@ichips.intel.com (2001-04-04)
Re: Thread-safety, lex and yacc. troy@bell-labs.com (Troy Cauble) (2001-04-10)
Re: Re: Thread-safety, lex and yacc. johnmillaway@yahoo.com (John W. Millaway) (2001-04-12)
Re: Thread-safety, lex and yacc. clark@lextek.com (Clark) (2001-04-12)
Re: Re: Thread-safety, lex and yacc. ethan.eade@duke.edu (Ethan Eade) (2001-04-14)
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From: Nicholas Dronen <ndronen@io.frii.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 31 Mar 2001 02:35:00 -0500
Organization: Front Range Internet, Inc. (800.935.6527)
Keywords: lex, yacc, parallel, comment
Posted-Date: 31 Mar 2001 02:35:00 EST

Hi,


I noticed that yylval is a global variable in the lex file for an
application I'm auditing for thread-safety. In the C++ source file
generated by lex, the variable is global as well. I suspect that this
doesn't bode well for the thread-safety of the application.


We use MKS lex. The reference manual says that yylval is a global
variable. On the other hand, it also says you can use the -DYYALLOC
preprocessor directive to yacc to generate reentrant code. I don't
see where it says anything about the reentrancy of the scanner.


Does anyone have experience with making an apparantly non-thread-safe
lex/yacc code base thread-safe? Suggestions and pointers welcome.


Regards,


Nicholas Dronen
[If you tell flex to generate a C++ lexer, it's thread safe. Haven't
seen a thread-safe yacc but I haven't looked very hard either. It
wouldn't be hard to do. -John]

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