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Flex (fast lexical analyzer generator) is a free and open-source software alternative to lex. [2] It is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers (also known as "scanners" or "lexers").
The RE/flex lexical analyzer generator accepts an extended syntax of Flex lexer specifications as input. The RE/flex specification syntax is more expressive than the traditional Flex lexer specification syntax and may include indentation anchors, word boundaries, lazy quantifiers (non-greedy, lazy repeats), and new actions such as wstr() to ...
Lex is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers ("scanners" or "lexers"). [1] [2] It is commonly used with the yacc parser generator and is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix and Unix-like systems. An equivalent tool is specified as part of the POSIX standard. [3]
Tokens are often defined by regular expressions, which are understood by a lexical analyzer generator such as lex, or handcoded equivalent finite-state automata. The lexical analyzer (generated automatically by a tool like lex or hand-crafted) reads in a stream of characters, identifies the lexemes in the stream, and categorizes them into tokens.
Originally written by Peter Bumbulis and described in his paper, [1] re2c was put in public domain and has been since maintained by volunteers. [3] It is the lexer generator adopted by projects such as PHP, [4] SpamAssassin, [5] Ninja build system [6] and others. Together with the Lemon parser generator, re2c is used in BRL-CAD. [7]
Regular languages are a category of languages (sometimes termed Chomsky Type 3) which can be matched by a state machine (more specifically, by a deterministic finite automaton or a nondeterministic finite automaton) constructed from a regular expression. In particular, a regular language can match constructs like "A follows B", "Either A or B ...
Because Yacc was the default compiler generator on most Unix systems, it was widely distributed and used. Derivatives such as GNU Bison are still in use. The compiler generated by Yacc requires a lexical analyzer. Lexical analyzer generators, such as lex or flex are widely available.
Ragel is a finite-state machine compiler and a parser generator. Initially Ragel supported output for C, C++ and Assembly source code, [4] later expanded to support several other languages including Objective-C, D, Go, Ruby, and Java. [5] Additional language support is also in development. [6]