Re: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False?

From	gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False?
Date	2022-05-06 14:30 -0700
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<22-05-015@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<22-05-003@comp.compilers> <22-05-011@comp.compilers>

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On Friday, May 6, 2022 at 9:14:54 AM UTC-7, George Neuner wrote:

(snip)

> Not to mention that programming languages which tend to actually be
> used also tend to be [relatively] easily parsed using LL(k).

An important part of a programming language is that people can understand it.

I suspect it isn't hard to design a language that computers can easily
parse, but people can't.  Your lexer only needs to be good enough for
actual programming languages.

As with BBQs, that doesn't stop people from trying.
[Take a look at Postscript, which is trivial to tokenize and parse since
it's a stream of tokens in RPN order, but making sense of it
by humans is a challenge.  Or, of course, m4.  -John]

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Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-05-04 11:22 +0000
  Re: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? Tom Shields <thomas.evans.shields@gmail.com> - 2022-05-04 14:14 -0500
  Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-05-05 15:20 +0300
    RE: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-05-06 11:16 +0000
      RE: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-05-07 13:15 +0300
        Simple Lexer and Simple Parser [ was RE: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? ] Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-05-08 13:34 +0000
  Re: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2022-05-06 11:00 -0400
    Re: Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-05-06 14:30 -0700
      Re: fun with Postscript, was Flex is the most powerful lexical analysis language in the world. True or False? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-05-07 13:10 -0700

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