Re: Applications using Lex/Flex & Yacc/Bison

Partha S Panda schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to figure out hardware or software applications other then
> compiler-related that utilize yacc/bison and lex/flex respectively.


Do you mean existing programs, or what *could* be done?


Most applications I know of use other parsers, not lex/yacc. It would be
interesting, though, *why* they use other parsers. I could imagine that
e.g. counting words or sentences in natural language text could be done
using lex/yacc, but would be easier to accomplish, and faster, by other
parser techniques.


In general lex/yacc allows to parse whatever can be represented in an LR
(LALR(1)?) grammar, but not all grammars are acceptable due to
restrictions (ambigous...). This could be any formatted data, like BNF,
HTML, RTF, TEX, phonebooks, log files, man/info files, or (textual)
output of many other programs. I'm not sure whether binary data can be
parsed as well, it may be necessary to modify lex/flex for that purpose.
Many other parsers come with example grammars that can *not* be used
with lex/yacc.


DoDi

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