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by BrandonM
6568 days ago
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The very last assignment was to use lex and yacc to compile the same language that we had spent the whole quarter writing a compiler and simulator for. The point of the class ("Compiler Design and Implementation") was not to learn the quickest way to write a compiler, but to learn about the common methods used in writing compilers (REs (finite automata) for the lexer, and LL, SLR, and LALR parsers for the compiler). Since this is precisely how lex and yacc work, someone coming out of the class would have the knowledge to port lex and yacc to another language or to perhaps even improve upon it. As for saying that lex and yacc "implement DSLs", that is a huge simplification of what they do. A large part of the work of lex and yacc is generating the tables and the engine code that are used to translate characters to tokens and token sequences to parser rules. Thanks to the work we did in using this same approach ourselves, it was much easier for me to understand what lex and yacc do and why various design decisions were made. |
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The DSLs I'm referring to are the lex input format and the yacc input format, both of which are specific languages for the domains of lexical analysis and parser generation respectively.