"Seibel: And are there development tools that just make you happy to program?
Thompson: I love yacc. I just love yacc. It just does exactly what you want done. Its complement, lex, is horrible. It does nothing you want done.
Seibel: Do you use it anyway or do you write your lexers by hand?
Thompson: I write my lexers by hand. Much easier."
I happen to like both bison and flex, which are relatively easy to use and bug-free in my experience. Yet your article spreads hundreds of lines of FUD about these tools, a strategy that many ANTLR people use.
I have used ANTLR. It is not intuitive, the documentation is horrible, if you happen to find some advice on Stackoverflow it is likely to be for another one of the incompatible versions.
I suppose if you use ANTLR long enough, these problems go away. But bison or Menhir don't have these problems in the first place.
Let's start the professional experience with another person's view:
https://research.swtch.com/yyerror
"Seibel: And are there development tools that just make you happy to program?
Thompson: I love yacc. I just love yacc. It just does exactly what you want done. Its complement, lex, is horrible. It does nothing you want done.
Seibel: Do you use it anyway or do you write your lexers by hand?
Thompson: I write my lexers by hand. Much easier."
I happen to like both bison and flex, which are relatively easy to use and bug-free in my experience. Yet your article spreads hundreds of lines of FUD about these tools, a strategy that many ANTLR people use.
I have used ANTLR. It is not intuitive, the documentation is horrible, if you happen to find some advice on Stackoverflow it is likely to be for another one of the incompatible versions.
I suppose if you use ANTLR long enough, these problems go away. But bison or Menhir don't have these problems in the first place.