Flex bison for windows

Recently, ive turned to Matlab as a simplistic language to extra computation information from an application. But to do this I needed to analyze the source code and build a dependency flow graph to represent the data dependencies between computations.

The simplest solution: a custom compiler.

I chose to use Flex & Bison since it would allow me to use these tools in either windows or a linux environment. So first we’ll go over where to go to get the install files and then the installation & configuration.

To get the Flex windows installer head over to http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/flex.htm and pick a download that suits your needs, although ill be using the “Complete package, except sources”. As you install the tool, be sure to choose an installation directory with NO SPACES in any of the folder names, i’ll be installing to “C:\GnuWin32”. At this point if you open a command window and type “flex” you should see: “‘flex’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.” This is because we need to add the folder containing the binary files (“C:\GnuWin32\bin”) that were just installed to the PATH system variable. After doing so, close the current cmd window and open a new one and try again. You should not see an error now (press CTRL+C to quit flex).

Pretty much the same procedure for Bison, head to http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/bison.htm for the download. Install to the same directory as above, and then type “bison” in the same cmd window (you dont have to close it and reopen it since the PATH does not have to be modified since the binaries are in the same folder), you should see: “bison: missing operand after ‘bison’ Try ‘bison –help’ for more information.” Congrats! Youve just setup Flex and Bison on windows!