Project Description
GPLEX is a scanner generator which produces lexical scanners written in C# V2 or higher. The input language is similar to the original LEX specification language, but allows full 21-bit Unicode scanners to be specified.
Features
GPLEX generates scanners based around finite state automata. The generated automata have the number of states minimized by default, and have a large number of options for table compression. The default compression scheme is chosen depending on the input alphabet cardinality, and almost always gives a reasonable result. However a large number of options are available for the user to tune the behavior if necessary.
The tool implements many of the FLEX extensions, including such things as start-state stacks.
The generated scanners are designed to interface cleanly with bottom-up parsers generated by Gardens Point Parser Generator. However, gplex-generated scanners have been successfully used with both handwritten parsers and with parsers generated by COCO/R.
Examples Of Use
There are a small number of examples of use included in the download package, and these are fully discussed in the documentation. For a more complex example GPLEX and the companion GPPG tool each themselves use scanners and parsers generated by GPLEX and GPPG.
There is a separate documentation file that deals with the special issues that arise with scanners that use the Unicode character set.