[COLUG] Lets talk about FLEX

[Tom Hanlon]

Hey Colug..

I know I can look this up but I figured some pithy insight from the  
group might be useful.

What is flex, what is lex ?

The wikipedia page helps.. but the big picture overview could be useful.

Also it seems that when i need Lex, I use FLEX  and also sometimes,  
YACC or BISON end up in the mix.

Are these all code generators of some sort ?

I also recall though my memory may be faulty that sometimes FLEX or  
BISON are required to deliver error output from soome programs.  
Meaning I *think* that i have sometimes seen a failing program make a  
call to one of them and then the error becomes the lack of flex ?

I just needed Lex for my config of a source PHP install. And then i  
got to thinking.

--
Tom