Re: Commercial LEX/YACC -vs- Flex/Bison

        I had an "issue" a few years ago with Abraxas's pcyacc accepting
input whereas standard yacc ( correctly ) reported an error. I worked
for a small, commercial product company at the time and the bug was
reported by an important customer. As such, I didn't take the time to
study and document the problem but rather I sent pcyacc to the land of
broken toys. ;)


        Despite this, I believe Abraxas is a great company with great
products.


My message is simply to encourage people using "yacc-alikes" to
periodically validate it against the tried-and-true yacc.


        While I use yacc quite a bit, I haven't used lex since
college. Using lex to scan tokens is akin to using a robot arm and a
nail gun to hang a picture in your living room; it's a superfluous
level of abstraction. Parser generators on the other hand have saved
millions of man-years...
[When the robot arm costs no more than a hammer and is considerably less
likely to land on your thumb, I think it's not a bad tool. -John]


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