Concept
Flex (fast lexical analyzer generator) is a free and open-source software alternative to lex. It is a computer program that generates lexical analyzers (also known as "scanners" or "lexers"). It is frequently used as the lex implementation together with Berkeley Yacc parser generator on BSD-derived operating systems (as both lex and yacc are part of POSIX), or together with GNU bison (a version of yacc) in BSD ports and in Linux distributions. Unlike Bison, flex is not part of the GNU Project and is not released under the GNU General Public License, although a manual for Flex was produced and published by the Free Software Foundation. Flex was written in C around 1987 by Vern Paxson, with the help of many ideas and much inspiration from Van Jacobson. Original version by Jef Poskanzer. The fast table representation is a partial implementation of a design done by Van Jacobson. The implementation was done by Kevin Gong and Vern Paxson. This is an example of a Flex scanner for the instructional programming language PL/0. The tokens recognized are: '+', '-', '', '/', '=', '(', ')', ',', ';', '.', ':=', '='; numbers: 0-9 {0-9}; identifiers: a-zA-Z {a-zA-Z0-9} and keywords: begin, call, const, do, end, if, odd, procedure, then, var, while. %{ #include "y.tab.h" %} digit [0-9] letter [a-zA-Z] %% "+" { return PLUS; } "-" { return MINUS; } "" { return TIMES; } "/" { return SLASH; } "(" { return LPAREN; } ")" { return RPAREN; } ";" { return SEMICOLON; } "," { return COMMA; } "." { return PERIOD; } ":=" { return BECOMES; } "=" { return EQL; } "" { return NEQ; } "" { return GTR; } "=" { return GEQ; } "begin" { return BEGINSYM; } "call" { return CALLSYM; } "const" { return CONSTSYM; } "do" { return DOSYM; } "end" { return ENDSYM; } "if" { return IFSYM; } "odd" { return ODDSYM; } "procedure" { return PROCSYM; } "then" { return THENSYM; } "var" { return VARSYM; } "while" { return WHILESYM; } {letter}({letter}|{digit}) { yylval.id = strdup(yytext); return IDENT; } {digit}+ { yylval.