On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Etaoin Shrdlu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tuesday 2 September 2008, 07:01, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: > >> I've been teaching myself scanners over the summer, thinking to teach >> my students this fall. >> >> It was hard because just about all of the examples are inadequate for >> one of these reasons: >> 1 They are pure lex, or pure yacc, not a combination. Ditto flex >> and bison. Most of such sample programs work okay, but they're not >> what's needed. Getting the parser and scanner to work together is the >> key thing. >> 2 They are spotty in their coverage of features >> 3 They are incomplete and fail to compile as presented; the >> documentation is very old-style UNIX in general, and very hard to >> learn the necessary fixes from it. >> 4 They are old and fail on modern versions of the software >> 5 They are just plain broken >> >> This applies to examples in the texinfo pages, the 2003 O'Reilly book, >> and online manuals. >> >> This is a very serious problem for learning these tools in their >> combined form. I'm relatively good at dealing with such stuff (having >> decades of practice), but I would not expect my undergrads to be able >> to learn with these materials. >> >> I was finally able to cobble together a working flex/bison parser from >> the bison-bridge example in an appendix to the flex info page. I'd >> like to share it, and perhaps other _working_ sample programs to the >> web at large. Does anyone know of a better venue for this than just >> some random page on my school's web server? I would like other people >> to be able to find this stuff and perhaps add to it or otherwise >> improve on it. > > When I had to study the subject, I found these documents (in addition to > the dragon book, which was of course the primary source of information > for the underlying theory): > > http://epaperpress.com/lexandyacc/ > http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/~lobaz/fjp/yacc/compiler_flex_bison.pdf > http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lexyac.html > > The above documents all contain examples of using lex+yacc together to > build an interpreter for simple languages, which is enough for an > undergrad course imho. Also, I seem to remember that the flex and bison > online manuals and the examples therein were quite accurate (but I might > be wrong, it was some time ago). > > I think a good place to discuss lex/yacc issues and get pointers to > resources is the comp.compilers newsgroup, see > http://compilers.iecc.com/index.phtml for more information, especially > the FAQ section. > > Another good place (maybe even better, since it's targeted to beginners) > is the compilers 101 mailing list, see > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/compilers101/ for more information. > >
Thanks, I've created a Google Group, and added these links to a page in it. Check out http://groups.google.com/group/compilerSamples -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
