README

             The LEMON Parser Generator

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 at:
http://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/lemon.html

Both the source code to lemon itself and the code that 
lemon generates are in the public domain.

To see an example of how to use lemon, see the source code 
to the SQLite database engine. Lemon is maintained as part 
of the SQLite project.