MultiLex, A Pipelined Lexical Analyzer

✍ Scribed by TIMOTHY BICKMORE; ROBERT E. FILMAN

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 90 KB
• Volume: 27
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-0644
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-024x(199701)27:1<25::aid-spe70>3.0.co;2-w

✦ Synopsis

MultiLex is a lexer generator designed to facilitate creation of lexical analyzers, particularly lexical analyzers for LALR(1) parsers of legacy languages. Innovative features of MultiLex include its pipeline architecture, lexical pattern-matching over a larger space of objects than just characters, reconfigurability for languages that include sub-languages, and lexically-scoped dictionary mechanism. We discuss the place of lexers in re-engineering of legacy languages, the features of MultiLex, and compare it to prior work on lexers.