How to use leex and yecc in Elixir

Leex and Yecc are incredibly powerful if you find yourself needing to parse something. Unfortunately, they also require a little bit of understanding. If you’re an elixir developer like me, you may find the DSL they use to describe tokens and grammars to be less than obvious. I spent a couple of days coming to terms with these tools, but since I’m not writing parsers very often, I decided to write this explanation to help me remember how these work for the next time I need them. This is the first part in a two part article. In this article we’ll use leex and yecc to parse a very simple grammar and explain how they work together. In the next article, I’ll talk about how I used them to create a parser for a more complex grammar, some tricks I learned about how to unit test, etc. Fair warning, I’m not an expert on these tools, just a guy who struggled to use them at first, and...