NAME
alex - the lexical analyser generator for Haskell
SYNOPSIS
alex [OPTION]... file [OPTION]...
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the alex command.
This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
because the original program does not have a manual page. Instead, it
has documentation in various other formats, including DVI, Info and
HTML; see below.
Alex is a lexical analyser generator system for Haskell. It is similar
to the tool lex or flex for C/C++.
Input files are expected to be of the form file.x and alex will produce
output in file.y
Caveat: When using hbc (Chalmers Haskell) the command argument
structure is slightly different. This is because the hbc run time
system takes some flags as its own (for setting things like the heap
size, etc). This problem can be circumvented by adding a single dash
(‘-’) to your command line. So when using a hbc generated version of
Alex, the argument structure is:
alex - [OPTION]... file [OPTION]...
OPTIONS
The programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long
options starting with two dashes (‘--’). A summary of options is
included below. For a complete description, see the other
documentation.
-d, --debug
Instructs Alex to generate a lexer which will output debugging
messsages as it runs.
-g, --ghc
Instructs Alex to generate a lexer which is optimised for
compiling with GHC. The lexer will be significantly more
efficient, both in terms of the size of the compiled lexer and
its runtime.
-o FILE, --outfile=FILE
Specifies the filename in which the output is to be placed. By
default, this is the name of the input file with the .x suffix
replaced by .hs
-i [FILE], --info[=FILE]
Produces a human-readable rendition of the state machine (DFA)
that Alex derives from the lexer, in FILE (default: file.info
where the input file is file.x ).
The format of the info file is currently a bit basic, and not
particularly informative.
-v, --version
Print version information on standard output then exit
successfully.
FILES
@DATADIR@
SEE ALSO
/usr/share/doc/alex, the Alex homepage (http://haskell.org/alex/)
COPYRIGHT
Alex Version 2.3.3
Copyright (c) 1995-2003, Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Ian Lynagh <igloo@debian.org>, based on
the happy manpage, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by
others).