Alex is a Lex-like tool for generating Haskell scanners. For complete documentation, see the doc directory.
For information on copying and distributing this program, see the file LICENSE in this directory.
The sources are in the src directory and the documentation in the doc
directory; various examples are in the examples subdirectory.
The source code in the src and examples directories is intended to work
with GHC >= 7.0.
If you just want to use Alex, you can download or install (via
cabal install alex) an
Alex release from Hackage; also note that
distributions such as the
Haskell Platform and other package
manager-based distributions provide packages for Alex. Moreover,
recent versions of cabal will automatically install the required
version of alex based on
build-tools/build-tool-depends declarations.
Read on if you want to build Alex directly from Git.
Alex is built using GHC & Cabal; so first install
GHC and
cabal-install-2.0 (or later).
Since Alex itself is implemented in terms of an Alex scanner, bootstrapping Alex is a bit tricky:
You need to have the build-tools alex and happy manually
installed; either via your system package manager distribution, the
Haskell Platform, or e.g. via (run this outside the Git repository!):
$ cabal install alex happy
which installs them into ${HOME}/.cabal/bin by default (make sure
they are in your $PATH for the next steps!).
You can install alex simply by invoking
$ cabal install
from inside the Git folder.
Alternatively, you can use the Makefile which automates the steps of
producing a self-contained pre-bootstrapped source distribution with
pre-generated lexer/scanners:
$ make sdist
$ cabal install dist/alex-*.tar.gz
For convenience, there is also a make sdist-test target which builds the
source source tarball and runs the test-suite from within the source dist.
Please report any bugs or comments at https://github.com/simonmar/alex/issues
Share and enjoy,
Chris Dornan: [email protected]
Isaac Jones: [email protected]
Simon Marlow: [email protected]
and recent contributors.
-
John Ericson (@Ericson2314)
-
Simon Marlow (@simonmar)