Re: why use flex?

colas@aye.inria.fr (Colas Nahaboo)
3 Feb 1999 23:52:42 -0500

          From comp.compilers

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| List of all articles for this month |

From: colas@aye.inria.fr (Colas Nahaboo)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 3 Feb 1999 23:52:42 -0500
Organization: Koala Project, Dyade/Bull
References: 99-01-111
Keywords: lex

Frank Hale <frankhale@worldnet.att.net> writes:
|> Why would someone use flex as opposed to writing there own lexer? I am
|> developing my own scripting language and find it much simpler to
|> create a lexer on my own, that way I can tailor it to my needs.


There is a third way, where you can avoid using a (f)lex-like parser,
which can be slow, and most importantly, difficult to debug, due to
its table-driven nature, but still avoiding to do a parser by hand,
which is error-prone, and can lead you to invent a language with "too
smart" syntaxic rules (TCL...), it is lexical generators building
"if-then-else" code rather than tables. A good example is re2c, open
source by Peter Bumbulis, see:


ftp://csg.uwaterloo.ca/pub/peter


--
Colas Nahaboo, Koala/Dyade/Bull @ INRIA Sophia, http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas


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