Flex/Bison IDE? [closed]

Question

I'm looking for a good development environment in which to work on flex or bison or both.

Are there any IDE's that have these capabilities and/or are suitable for this?

(If not the next most general question is are there lexer/parser generators with IDE's?)

Thanks ~Alex

Answer 1

Vim has excellent syntax highlighting support for flex / lex and bison / yacc files. Vim seems to guess from file extensions, so as long as my flex files end in .l or .lex and my bison files end in .y, it seems to work fine. I know, it's barely an IDE, but I find the syntax highlighting to be the most helpful feature for me.

Answer 2

ANTLR has several IDEs available, including one I wrote. By user count, ANTLRWorks is probably the most used. Mine has fewer overall features, but I use it extensively because it integrates so cleanly with my Visual Studio work. ANTLR's grammar syntax is clean and very powerful, generates code for many languages, and its generated lexers/parsers are clean, debuggable code.

Edit to address concerns in the comments:

• Commercial documentation for ANTLR exists and is recommended by many, but is certainly not required. The nFringe IDE product (commercial/closed source) I worked on uses ANTLR extensively and was developed completely without the aid of the ANTLR reference book.
• ANTLRWorks 1.x development is slow, but not stopped. There are currently no open issues, and two significant issues have been fixed since the latest 1.5 release.
• ANTLRWorks 2 is a completely different product and was written from scratch. A separate issue tracker is available for this product.