YACC Meaning and
Definition
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Yacc, short for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler," is a computer program that serves as a parser generator. Developed in the 1970s by Stephen C. Johnson at AT&T Bell Laboratories, yacc is designed to assist in the creation of parsers for computer languages. It is commonly used in the field of compiler construction.
Yacc takes as input a formal grammar description for a language and produces efficient parsing code in a target programming language, usually C or C++. This generated code then uses a parsing algorithm called LALR (Look-Ahead LR) parsing to analyze the structure of input text and determine if it conforms to the specified grammar rules.
The grammar description provided to yacc typically consists of a set of production rules that define how valid language constructs can be assembled from its components. These rules define the syntax of the language and are written in a notation similar to Backus-Naur Form (BNF). Yacc utilizes these rules to automatically generate a finite state machine parser to recognize and parse the language according to its grammar.
By using yacc, programming language designers can focus on defining the syntax and semantics of their languages without needing to implement a parsing algorithm from scratch. Yacc, along with its companion tool Lex, provides a powerful toolkit for generating efficient parsers and scanners as part of the process of creating compilers or interpreters for new programming languages.
Common Misspellings for YACC
Etymology of YACC
The word "yacc" is an acronym for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler". It was created by its developers Stephen C. Johnson and Michael Lesk at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s. The name was chosen as a playful reference to an earlier compiler generator called "compiler-compiler" or "cc", which was used to generate the C compiler at Bell Labs. Essentially, "yacc" represents the idea that their tool was just another in a long line of similar tools.
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