Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!us.feeder.erje.net!news.linkpendium.com!news.linkpendium.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED!nerds-end From: Hans-Peter Diettrich Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: Applications using Lex/Flex & Yacc/Bison Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 05:42:52 +0100 Organization: Compilers Central Lines: 25 Sender: johnl@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <13-11-010@comp.compilers> References: <13-11-006@comp.compilers> NNTP-Posting-Host: news.iecc.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: leila.iecc.com 1384093038 14238 64.57.183.58 (10 Nov 2013 14:17:18 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@iecc.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 14:17:18 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: lex, yacc Posted-Date: 10 Nov 2013 09:17:17 EST X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:1034 Partha S Panda schrieb: > Hi, > > I am trying to figure out hardware or software applications other then > compiler-related that utilize yacc/bison and lex/flex respectively. Do you mean existing programs, or what *could* be done? Most applications I know of use other parsers, not lex/yacc. It would be interesting, though, *why* they use other parsers. I could imagine that e.g. counting words or sentences in natural language text could be done using lex/yacc, but would be easier to accomplish, and faster, by other parser techniques. In general lex/yacc allows to parse whatever can be represented in an LR (LALR(1)?) grammar, but not all grammars are acceptable due to restrictions (ambigous...). This could be any formatted data, like BNF, HTML, RTF, TEX, phonebooks, log files, man/info files, or (textual) output of many other programs. I'm not sure whether binary data can be parsed as well, it may be necessary to modify lex/flex for that purpose. Many other parsers come with example grammars that can *not* be used with lex/yacc. DoDi