Opinions on lex and yacc thus far....

[Tim Tessin]

In article <1988Mar3.184732.1144 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > So far, everyone agrees that:
> > 
> > 1)	lex is slow because it is so general.
> 
> Not quite true:  lex is slow because its implementation is poor.  Van
> Jacobson of LBL gave a paper at Usenix a year ago observing that if one
> reimplemented lex for speed, it could consistently outrun hand-cooked
> scanners.  Unfortunately, his paper didn't make it into the proceedings,
> and he appears to have broken his promise to post it to the net.
> -- 
> Those who do not understand Unix are |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> condemned to reinvent it, poorly.    | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry

The LBL fast lex (flex) is currently in beta and they claim that a 
real, honest-to-god distribution version will be ready in March (this month).
The beta code is available from one of the lbl or berkeley machines via
ftp.  Unfortunately, I have deleted the article referencing which machine.
If you have good news archives, search for "flex" in most appropriate 
newsgroups.  It was about a month or so ago.  I have the code, but 
I hesitate to admit it lest I get deluged with request for it.  I haven't
tried it yet.

Tim Tessin - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 
Phone: (415) 423-4560 / 422-8971
ARPA:  tjt at ati.tis.llnl.gov
       tjt at lll-ati.arpa
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