ALEX(1) 						  Alex Lexical Analyser Generator						   ALEX(1)

NAME

       alex - the lexical analyser generator for Haskell

SYNOPSIS

       alex [OPTION]... file [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the alex command.

       This  manual  page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.  Instead, it
       has documentation in various other formats, including DVI, Info and HTML; see below.

       Alex is a lexical analyser generator system for Haskell. It is similar to the tool lex or flex for C/C++.

       Input files are expected to be of the form file.x and alex will produce output in file.y

       Caveat: When using hbc (Chalmers Haskell) the command argument structure is slightly different.	This is because the hbc  run  time  system
       takes  some  flags as its own (for setting things like the heap size, etc).  This problem can be circumvented by adding a single dash (`-')
       to your command line.  So when using a hbc generated version of Alex, the argument structure is:

       alex - [OPTION]... file [OPTION]...

OPTIONS

       The programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`--').  A summary of options is included
       below.  For a complete description, see the other documentation.

       -d, --debug
	      Instructs Alex to generate a lexer which will output debugging messsages as it runs.

       -g, --ghc
	      Instructs  Alex  to generate a lexer which is optimised for compiling with GHC. The lexer will be significantly more efficient, both
	      in terms of the size of the compiled lexer and its runtime.

       -o FILE, --outfile=FILE
	      Specifies the filename in which the output is to be placed. By default, this is the name of  the	input  file  with  the	.x  suffix
	      replaced by .hs

       -i [FILE], --info[=FILE]
	      Produces	a  human-readable rendition of the state machine (DFA) that Alex derives from the lexer, in FILE (default: file.info where
	      the input file is file.x ).

	      The format of the info file is currently a bit basic, and not particularly informative.

       -v, --version
	      Print version information on standard output then exit successfully.

FILES

       @DATADIR@

SEE ALSO

       /usr/share/doc/alex, the Alex homepage (http://haskell.org/alex/) <http://haskell.org/alex/>

COPYRIGHT

       Alex Version 3.0.1

       Copyright (c) 1995-2003, Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Ian Lynagh <igloo@debian.org>, based on the happy manpage, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used
       by others).

Glasgow FP Suite						    2003-09-09								   ALEX(1)