Lex Definition

lex

English

Etymology

From lexical analysis, from lexical

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA: /lɛks/

  Rhymes: -ɛks

Verb

lex (third-person singular simple present lexes, present participle lexing, simple past and past participle lexed)

1. (computing) To perform lexical analysis; to convert a character stream to a token stream as a preliminary to parsing.
   • 1994, Donna K Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology, The Second Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-2)

     Once this is done, each processor parses and lexes its own documents, using conventional programming techniques.

   • 2004, Richard William Sharp, Higher-level hardware synthesis

     SAFL source is lexed and parsed into an abstract syntax tree.

   • 2007, Don Syme, Adam Granicz, Antonio Cisternino, Expert F#

     Lexing and parsing do not have to be separated, and there are often convenient .NET methods for extracting information from text in particular formats...

Derived terms

• lexer

See also

• lex (software) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia:lex (software)

Latin

Noun

lēx (genitive lēgis); f, third declension

1. A law
   • Publilius Syrus (translation Benham's Book of Quotations 1948)

     Lex universa est quae iubet nasci et mori.

     The universal law is that which ordains that we are to be born and to die.

     dura lex, sed lex.

     The law is tough but it is the law.

Inflection

Derived terms

Descendants

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