FLEX

FLEX is a historical grammar language created in 1987. 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. Read more on Wikipedia...

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• FLEX ranks in the top 20% of languages
• the FLEX website
• the FLEX wikipedia page
• FLEX first appeared in 1987
• See also: bison, yacc, c, ratfor, pl-0
• I have 51 facts about FLEX. what would you like to know? email me and let me know how I can help.

Example code from Wikipedia:

%{
#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 LSS;        }
">"                  { return GTR;        }
"<="                 { return LEQ;        }
">="                 { 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.num = atoi(yytext);
                       return NUMBER;     }
[ \t\n\r]            /* skip whitespace */
.                    { printf("Unknown character [%c]\n",yytext[0]);
                       return UNKNOWN;    }
%%

int yywrap(void){return 1;}

Last updated October 14th, 2019