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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Incomplete, poorly organized, and not very well written, April 6, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)
As with several other O'Reilly books, I found Lex & Yacc to be maddeningly uneven. The approach is to give a too-brief synopsis of the tool, then illustrate its use using a very specific example that, one suspects, is merely the handiest project the authors had available. I had a fair bit of programming experience when I bought the book, but none with Lex or Yacc. Some fundamental questions came up during the course of my muddling through, and these were left unanswered. I actually got more insight into these tools from a ~20-page web site on the topic. The reference chapters are organized alphabetically ("ambiguities & conflicts", "bugs", ..., "%ident declaration"), and in a way that does not help someone who is looking for a specific answer (in trying to find out about the possibility of more than one parser in a program, who would think to look under 'v' for "variant and multiple grammars"?). These 'reference chapters' seemed more like a place to dump the information not discussed elsewhere. Maybe it's a lost cause, finding a comprehensive, well-written introduction to such an arcane topic, but I'm still looking.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
ok, but there is a better LEX/YACC book, April 26, 2004
This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)
To keep it simple, the book "Introduction to Compiler Construction in UNIX" introduces and explains LEX/YACC far better than this book. It uses a more realistic example and shows the error handling in more detail. This book is ok for a quick intro, but for a 'real" user, refer to the book I mentioned above.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, March 12, 2004
This review is from: lex & yacc (Paperback)
This book was disappointing. I had hoped for a tutorial and reference on Lex/Yacc Flex/Bison for building language recognisers, but in the tradition of "yet another boring and useless reverse polish notation" calculator - it gives us a desktop infix expression calculator. (How could I have possibly guessed?) The book presents some interesting material for those who want to parse SQL, but if you're eager to learn about translating programming languages, this book is nearly useless. It gives superficial and confusing treatment of language constructs like "if-then-else" statements, and gives only an exercise for recognising a function call and "playing it back." (I feel these are cop-outs.) It also fails to explain clearly how to construct unambiguous grammars, or use facilities for operator precedence or whatver to control the ambiguity. To be fair, I am guessing this was meant as a reference for Lex/Yacc for those who already know how to construct language recognisers and have some knowledge of using these tools. But then why bother to give especially bad tutorial material in the early chapters if this were the case? This books is also in need of a new edition.
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