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From: "William B. Clodius" <wclodius@lanl.gov>
Subject: Re: Ayacc/Aflex "entropy" (P2Ada)
Date: 1999/10/26
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Ted Dennison wrote:
> <snip>
> I'd like to third that request for references. I'm doing my thesis in
> this area, so I'd like to be at least nominally informed on the subject.
> :-)
> 
> But a web search on my part lead to only *one* alternative to lex/yacc.
> I'd particularly like to know about what parts of lex and or yacc are
> considered inadaquate or outdated.
> <snip>

It must have been an unimaginative search, ( are you restricting
yourself only to generators that output Ada?, of which I know two
(AYACC/AFLEX and Cocktail)). There are tons of alternatives (with output
in C, C++, Java, Ada, Eiffel, Forth, Icon, Smalltalk, SML, Haskell,
Pearl, Python, (TCL?), Basic, Pascal, Modula 2, Oberon, even Fortran
(though LR no longer seems to be available in its original form)), which
is part of the problem. If there were one alternative it would stand out
and be recognized, but with many alternatives many people simply go with
the best known rather than spending the several days necessary to
evaluate several alternatives. For starting points try

http://www.first.gmd.de/cogent/catalog/
http://iecc.com/compilers/tools.html
http://www.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk/research/languages/lookahead_backtrack.shtml
and while it requirees some searching http://www.idiom.com/free-compilers/

for opinions you might search in the comp.compilers newsgroup archives http://www.iecc.com/compilers/

Two have their own newsgroups

compilers.tools.pccts
compilers.tools.javacc