lex & yacc

by John R. Levine, Tony Mason, Doug Brown

This book shows you how to use two Unix utilities, lex and yacc, in program development. These tools help programmers build compilers and interpreters, but they also have a wider range of applications.

The second edition contains completely revised tutorial sections for novice users and reference sections for advanced users. This edition is twice the size of the first and has an expanded index.

The following material has been added:


Each utility is explained in a chapter that covers basic usage and simple, stand-alone applications How to implement a full SQL grammar, with full sample code Major MS-DOS and Unix versions of lex and yacc are explored in depth, including AT&T lex and yacc, Berkeley yacc, Berkeley/GNU Flex, GNU Bison, MKS lex and yacc, and Abraxas PCYACC

Genres: Programming, Computer Science, Reference, Technical, Computers, Nonfiction, Technology

388 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

Reviews

[Bhaskar Chowdhury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-brushed my understanding and wonderful read because of authors build crystal clear explanation. It helps also because of my familiarity with the topic. This book binds my wayward information and knowledge to perspective and solidified it.

Thank you so much for writing such easy and gulp-able meterial for ordinary mortals like us.

[Phani Tholeti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decently written book - it covers the main tasks (of lexer and parser) in sufficient detail. More importantly it gives good references to continue studying for those interested. The code examples are where things aren't as great. While the SQL parser is easily understandable, since, even if one doesn't know sql, the bare amounts of sql required are given in the book, the same can't be said about the other example the MGL (Menu Generation Language) which assumes familiarity with curses and the whole idea of generating menus in said style seems very artificial (for lack of a better word, and figure of speech). Probably a second example of a subset of more well known languages (or those that can be explained in a single chapter) would have been great (probably something like awk/python maybe?)

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful, lots of useful examples.

[Gabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lex and Yacc are really powerful tools. As usual, O'Reilly delivers the goods.

[Amanpreet Singh]

best tool

[Aaron Schnoebelen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice description of the power of these tools, and also how to use them.