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From: Robert van Engelen <ravengelen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: [ANN] major release of RE/flex 1.2.8
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2019 10:25:12 -0400 (EDT)
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Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce a major release of RE/flex 1.2.8.  Thanks to many
users of RE/flex and their feedback, we improved RE/flex, added new features,
and included new examples.

RE/flex is the regex-centric, fast lexical analyzer generator for C++.
RE/flex can be used as a faster and reliable drop-in replacement of Flex++.


RE/flex offers the following features, to name a few:

- Compatible with Flex to eliminate a learning curve, making a transition to
RE/flex frustration-free.

- Generates reusable source code that is easy to understand.

- Works with Bison and supports reentrant, bison-bridge, bison-locations,
Bison 3.0 C++ interface `%skeleton "lalr1.cc"` and Bison complete symbols.

- Includes many examples, such as a tokenizer for C/C++ source code, a
tokenizer for Python source code, a tokenizer for Java source code, and more.

- Extensive documentation included.

- Full Unicode support with Unicode property matching \p{C} and C++11, Java,
C#, and Python Unicode properties for identifier name matching.

- Indent/nodent/dedent anchors to match text with indentation, including \t
(tab) adjustments.

- Lazy quantifiers, so hacks are no longer needed to work around greedy
repetitions in Flex.

- Word boundary anchors.

- Freespace mode option to improve readability of lexer specifications.

- %class and %init directives to customize the generated Lexer classes.

- %include to modularize lexer specifications.

- Includes an extensible hierarchy of pattern matcher engines, with a choice
of regex engines, including the RE/flex regex engine and Boost.Regex.

- Generates clean source code that defines an thread-safe (reentrant) C++
Lexer class derived from an abstract lexer class template, parameterized by
matcher class type.

- Multiple lexer classes can be combined and used in one application, e.g. by
multiple threads.

- Configurable Lexer class generation to customize the interface for various
parsers, including Yacc and Bison.

- Generates scanners for lexical analysis on files, C++ streams, and (wide)
strings, with automatic fast conversion of UTF-16/32 to UTF-8 for matching
Unicode on UTF-encoded input files.

- Generates lex.yy.cpp files while Flex++ generates lex.yy.cc files, to
distinguish the generated files.

- Generates Graphviz files to visualize FSMs with the Graphviz dot tool.


RE/flex is available on GitHub and SourceForge:

https://github.com/Genivia/RE-flex
https://sourceforge.net/projects/re-flex

Documentation:

https://re-flex.sourceforge.net
Https://www.genivia.com/doc/reflex/index.html

Give us your feedback, comments, suggestions.

Thanks for using RE/flex!!

- Robert