n138ct@tamuts.tamu.edu (Brent Burton) (11/26/90)
I have flex and bison, but out of curiousity I was wondering if
the soruces for yacc and lex are available. I _did_ hear recently on
the net that the yacc code is available. However, I wasn't able to take
note of it at the time.
Thanks for any info.
+----------------------+------------------------+
| Brent Burton | n138ct@tamuts.tamu.edu |
| Texas A&M University | brentb@nuchat.UUCP |
+----------------------+------------------------+lbr@holos0.uucp (Len Reed) (11/28/90)
In article <BRISTER.90Nov26133944@westworld.decwrl.dec.com> brister@decwrl.dec.com (James Brister) writes: >On 26 Nov 90 04:02:49 GMT, n138ct@tamuts.tamu.edu (Brent Burton) said: > >> I have flex and bison, but out of curiousity I was wondering if >> the soruces for yacc and lex are available.... >I'm sure someone will point it out if I'm wrong :-), but lex and yacc are >AT&T code that you won't be able to get unless you pay big bucks. Correct. Be aware, though, that flex (fast lex) comes from Berkeley is is owned by the Regents of the U. of Calif. Berkeley yacc is also available; it was posted to comp.sources.{unix or misc}. Both of these programs have very liberal copyrights: you can do pretty much what you want with it other than sell it or claim you wrote it. (Don't quote me on this--get the copyright yourself and hire a team of laywers to decode it. :-)) Bison comes from the FSF. It's free in the sense that it doesn't cost any money, but it comes with more strings attached. In particular, I wouldn't use it to generate anything I intended to sell. I highly recommended flex as a drop in replacement for lex. It runs much faster than lex, generates faster lexers, and has additional useful features. It even runs on DOS. I consider it to have made lex obsolete. I have no corresponding opinions on compiler-compilers. Bison runs on DOS; I don't know if Berkeley yacc runs on DOS. I yacc'ed perl with it on Xenix 386 after it [B. yacc] was posted, but I continue to use yacc. -- Len Reed Holos Software, Inc. Voice: (404) 496-1358 UUCP: ...!gatech!holos0!lbr