Concept
Lex (software)
Related concepts (16)
Syntax (programming languages)
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data. The syntax of a language defines its surface form. Text-based computer languages are based on sequences of characters, while visual programming languages are based on the spatial layout and connections between symbols (which may be textual or graphical).
Make (software)
In software development, Make is a build automation tool that builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading s called makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Though integrated development environments and language-specific compiler features can also be used to manage a build process, Make remains widely used, especially in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Make can be used to manage any project where some files need to be updated automatically from others whenever the others change in addition to building programs.
Unix
Unix (ˈjuːnᵻks; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).
Parsing
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part (of speech). The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science. Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams.
Flex (lexical analyser generator)
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.
Yacc
Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a Look Ahead Left-to-Right Rightmost Derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser (the part of a compiler that tries to make syntactic sense of the source code) based on a formal grammar, written in a notation similar to Backus–Naur Form (BNF). Yacc is supplied as a standard utility on BSD and AT&T Unix. GNU-based Linux distributions include Bison, a forward-compatible Yacc replacement.
Comparison of parser generators
This is a list of notable lexer generators and parser generators for various language classes. 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.
Compiler-compiler
In computer science, a compiler-compiler or compiler generator is a programming tool that creates a parser, interpreter, or compiler from some form of formal description of a programming language and machine. The most common type of compiler-compiler is more precisely called a parser generator. It only handles syntactic analysis. The input of a parser generator is a grammar file, typically written in Backus–Naur form (BNF) or extended Backus–Naur form (EBNF) that defines the syntax of a target programming language.
Lexical analysis
Lexical tokenization is conversion of a text into (semantically or syntactically) meaningful lexical tokens belonging to categories defined by a "lexer" program. In case of a natural language, those categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuations etc. In case of a programming language, the categories include identifiers, operators, grouping symbols and data types. Lexical tokenization is not the same process as the probabilistic tokenization, used for large language model's data preprocessing, that encode text into numerical tokens, using byte pair encoding.
Backus–Naur form
In computer science, Backus–Naur form (ˌbækəs_ˈnaʊər) or Backus normal form (BNF) is a metasyntax notation for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing, such as computer programming languages, document formats, instruction sets and communication protocols. It is applied wherever exact descriptions of languages are needed: for instance, in official language specifications, in manuals, and in textbooks on programming language theory.