[Pdx-pm] Lex'n and Parse'n

Kyle Hayes kyle_hayes at speakeasy.net
Tue Sep 17 23:15:50 CDT 2002


On Tuesday 17 September 2002 19:46, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> >>>>> "josh" == josh hoblitt <jhoblitt at mysun.com> writes:
>
> josh> I was wondering if someone would be willing to give me a little
> off list
>  josh> hand holding?  Instead of just using something like
> Parse::RecDecent I'd 
> josh> like to understand some of theory behind it
> as well.  If your interested 
> josh> I'll email you with what exactly it
> is I'm up to.
>
> The O'Reilly "lex and yacc" book I'm told is quite a good tutorial
> on the subject.  Sorry, I don't have one here (they didn't give
> me "one of everything" when I signed up, darn) to be able to verify
> that claim, but perhaps one of your friends has a copy.

It's fairly good.  Make sure you get a later edition.  The earlier ones 
(only the first?) had a lot of bugs in the code and text.

The book is very C oriented.  I think that it isn't bad to show you what 
lex and yacc can do, but it doesn't tell you how to harness the power of 
Perl in that kind of context.

Here's the bibliographic info:

"lex & yacc", John R. Levine, Tony Mason, Doug Brown, O'Reilly and 
Associates, 1995, ISBN1-56592-000-7.

My copy is the second edition with the printing history showing minor 
corrections in 1995 and an original printing in 1992.  I think there might 
be a third edition, but I haven't checked Powell's to see.  I very rarely 
see a used copy, so I suspect that most people feel that it's a "keeper".

I'd love to chat about parsing etc. but I don't think I'm too far ahead of 
you!

Best,
Kyle




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