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 messages 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 3.4.0.1

       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).