yacc

The intent is to allow for things like generating code from protobuf specs and yacc.

We did network programming by wrapping raw sockets in C and writing stream parsers in lex and yacc.

But yacc is a heavy lifting tool and not something like a macro every one could use.

This resulted in a large number of improvements over the standard Unix tools (a great example being bison vs yacc).

Of course, maybe to get that general, you may as well simply use lex and yacc to write a compiler.

If you have project that uses bison, yacc or byacc, try one of the other ones every once in a while.

I think that tweet is more about using Lex or Yacc instead of hand-coding logic to parse strings.

Honest question, wouldn't you just write a lexer with yacc/bison for a DSL?

You write the structure, yacc generates the parser (and flex the lexer).

On contrary: The yacc tool gives great power to expand the language.

Lojban's regular enough that there's a yacc grammar for it?

Most parsers nowadays are generated via yacc and others.

The first lexer and recursive descent parser from Levine's "Lex & Yacc" book has been hammered into my head.

Lex/Yacc are great for parsing things like your own internal files that the end-user never directly touches.

C is so much the wrong language to write programming languages in, that they wrote Yacc, Bison, etc because programming parsers and lexers are so impossibly difficult to write in such a limited language like C, that people gave up, and made tools to generate C code for them.