The Automatic Generation of Fast Lexical Analysers
Vincent P. Heuring · Software Practice and Experience · 1986
This paper describes lexical analyser generators that accept specifications for the basic symbols of a programming language, and produce directly executing lexical analysers in Pascal or C as output. The resulting analysers are up to five times as fast as the typical interpreted lexical analyser generated from arbitrary regular expressions and actions. An example is given showing how these tools may be combined with others in a compiler construction environment.