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The Styx Handbook

Lars Dölle, Heike Manns lars.doelle@on-line.de heike@free-it.org

Version 1.3, 3 Mar 2001


Styx is a scanner/parser generator designed to address some shortcomings of the traditional lex/yacc combination. It has unique features like automatic derivation of depth grammar, production of the derivation tree including it's C interface, preservation of full source information and pretty printing to faciliate source-source translation, persistence to aid rapid interpreter writing. For application in contemporary computing environments, it supports unicode, reentrancy and offers thread-safeness. Last but not least, Styx works well under many different OSes, among them dos, windows, and serveral unixes. It has been successfully used in many applications and is known to provide rapid compiler development. Both from our practical experience as well as from the amount of written code, the gain in development time for realistic languages versus lex/yacc is a factor of about 5-10.

1. Introduction and Overview

2. A walk-through applying Styx

3. The Styx Language Specification

4. The Concrete Derivation Tree

5. Mapping Trees to Terms

6. The Handyman's Guide to Styx

7. A realistic Styx example

8. Using persistence

9. Odds'n'Ends

10. References

11. Bibliography

12. Appendix


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