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Lemon is an LALR(1) parser generator for C or C++. It does the same job as ``bison'' and ``yacc''. But lemon is not another bison or yacc clone. It uses a different grammar syntax which is designed to reduce the number of coding errors. Lemon also uses a more sophisticated parsing engine that is faster than yacc and bison and which is both reentrant and thread-safe. Furthermore, Lemon implements features that can be used to eliminate resource leaks, making is suitable for use in long-running programs such as graphical user interfaces or embedded controllers. This document is an introduction to the Lemon parser generator. The main goal of Lemon is to translate a context free grammar (CFG) for a particular language into C code that implements a parser for that language. The program has two inputs: The grammar specification. A parser template file. Typically, only the grammar sp...

The Lemon program is an LALR(1) parser generator. It takes a context free grammar and converts it into a subroutine that will parse a file using that grammar. Lemon is similar to the much more famous programs "YACC" and "BISON". But lemon is not compatible with either yacc or bison. There are several important differences: Lemon using a different grammar syntax which is less prone to programming errors. The parser generated by Lemon is both re-entrant and thread-safe. Lemon includes the concept of a non-terminal destructor, which makes it much easier to write a parser that does not leak memory. The complete source code to the lemon parser generator is contained in two files. The file lemon.c is the parser generator program itself. A separate file lempar.c is the template for the parser subroutine that lemon generates. Documentation on lemon is also available. Both t...