Commercial LEX/YACC -vs- Flex/Bison

Does anyone have recommendations as to whether the commercially
available Lex/YACC packages are significantly better than Flex and
Bison. Specifically, the tools from MKS and Abraxas? I've been using
Flex and Bison with much success (WinTel platform) and am trying to
understand the benefits of these packages (which cost $400 - $1000).


Also, does anyone have experience with the grammars supplied with
Abraxas and are they complex and complex enough to use to develop
transformation engines (e.g., C to VB)?


  Any advice is greatly appreciated.


TIA
[On 16 bit platforms, the commercial systems worked a lot better than
the freeware. On 32 bit platforms, there's a lot less difference.
MKS has a bunch of debugging stuff that can be nice, but the basic
yacc and lex function in the commercial versions is about the same as
Berkeley yacc and flex. I looked at Abraxas' sample grammars a while ago,
and they're not a whole lot more than the yacc file. -John]






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