duane@RELAY.CS.NET (Duane Szafron) (02/18/89)
There has been some recent discussion about lexical analyser generators in this newsgroup. You might be interested in trying our new scanner generator which is called LexAGen. LexAGen generates C-code scanners which are slightly slower than GLA scanners (96% as fast) and like GLA uses direct execution instead of table interpretation. LexAGen is an interactive scanner generation environment so that syntactic and static semantic specification errors are reported as you make them. In addition, LexAGen builds an internal automata representation incrementally as you specify the scanner. You can test the partially specified scanner at any time inside of the environment and edit individual specification productions. The only catch is that LexAGen is implemented in Smalltalk-80 so you will need Smalltalk-80 to run it. (I assume that it would require extensive modifications to run it on any other dialect of Smalltalk since it makes extensive use of MVCs). Note that although you need to have Smalltalk-80 to run it, you don't need to know Smalltalk to use it. I am willing to e-mail the Smalltalk-80 source code for LexAGen to anyone who sends me a direct request by e-mail. I am also willing to send copies of the users manual (a technical report) by post to people who want to use LexAGen. Since LexAGen is research product, it is not production quality so you are warned ahead of time that there may be some bugs! Duane Szafron Programming Languages and Methodologies Group Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, AB CANADA T6G 2H1 email: duane@alberta.uucp -- Send compilers articles to ima!compilers or, in a pinch, to Levine@YALE.EDU Plausible paths are { decvax | harvard | yale | bbn}!ima Please send responses to the originator of the message -- I cannot forward mail accidentally sent back to compilers. Meta-mail to ima!compilers-request