It’s not entirely what you want but there is a very excelent Bison mode for Emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BisonMode This is a better link: http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/emacs/elisp-archive/incoming/bison-mode.el.gz Since Yacc and bison are so closely related I don’t find it lacking too much. Though I do most of my work with Antlr anymore.
Parsing C++ is extremely hard because the grammar is undecidable. To quote Yossi Kreinin: Outstandingly complicated grammar “Outstandingly” should be interpreted literally, because all popular languages have context-free (or “nearly” context-free) grammars, while C++ has undecidable grammar. If you like compilers and parsers, you probably know what this means. If you’re not into this kind … Read more
A string consists of a quote mark ” followed by zero or more of either an escaped anything \\. or a non-quote character, non-backslash character [^”\\] and finally a terminating quote ” Put it all together, and you’ve got \”(\\.|[^”\\])*\” The delimiting quotes are escaped because they are Flex meta-characters.
The following routines are available for setting up input buffers for scanning in-memory strings instead of files (as yy_create_buffer does): YY_BUFFER_STATE yy_scan_string(const char *str): scans a NUL-terminated string` YY_BUFFER_STATE yy_scan_bytes(const char *bytes, int len): scans len bytes (including possibly NULs) starting at location bytes Note that both of these functions create, return a corresponding YY_BUFFER_STATE … Read more
I’m a happy user of PLY. It is a pure-Python implementation of Lex & Yacc, with lots of small niceties that make it quite Pythonic and easy to use. Since Lex & Yacc are the most popular lexing & parsing tools and are used for the most projects, PLY has the advantage of standing on … Read more
As for today (2011-04-05, updated 2017-11-29) you will need the lastest versions of: flex-2.5.4a-1.exe bison-2.4.1-setup.exe After that, do a full install in a directory of your preference without spaces in the name. I suggest C:\GnuWin32. Do not install it in the default (C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32) because bison has problems with spaces in directory names, not … Read more
Use the synaptic packet manager in order to install yacc / lex. If you are feeling more comfortable doing this on the console just do: sudo apt-get install bison flex There are some very nice articles on the net on how to get started with those tools. I found the article from CodeProject to be … Read more
C90 does not support the boolean data type. C99 does include it with this include: #include <stdbool.h>
There are some differences between Lex and Flex, but you have to be abusing Lex to run into the problems with Flex. (I have a program which abuses Lex and doesn’t work under Flex, therefore.) This is primarily in the area of input lookahead; in Lex, you can provide your own input code and modify … Read more