Alex - A simple and efficient scanner generator

Alex is a scanner generator which translates the lexical description of a programming language into a scanner for that language. The scanner description language is easy to use, as it is intentionally small and simple. Alex as well as the generated scanners are written in Modula-2 and implemented on several microcomputers. The scanner generator may be used in conjunction with a compiler-compiler. As an example we show how to describe the lexical structure of Modula-2 with our tool. The scanner generated from that description is only about 20 percent slower than a hand-coded scanner.