If you specifically want YACC-like behavior (table-driven), the only one I know is CUP. In the Java world, it seems that more people lean toward recursive descent parsers like ANTLR or JavaCC. And efficiency is seldom a reason to pick a parser generator.
In a nutshell, give your grammar files a .ym extension instead of .y. Xcode will then run Bison with the necessary magic to support Objective-C. Oddly enough, I found this question because I wanted to do the same thing. I remembered a discussion about it on Apple’s cocoa-dev mailing list, but this question came up … Read more
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
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
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
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
Update/warning: This answer may be out of date! One major difference is that ANTLR generates an LL(*) parser, whereas YACC and Bison both generate parsers that are LALR. This is an important distinction for a number of applications, the most obvious being operators: expr ::= expr ‘+’ expr | expr ‘-‘ expr | ‘(‘ expr … Read more