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Re this question: Lexical Tie-Ins with Flex and Bison there are two things called "flex". Is there another tag for one or the other which could be used instead?

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Yes, gnu-flex has become the tag to use. I've retagged the question accordingly.

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I'm not sure how to go about editing tags, or I would have already, but this was a poor choice of tag. Flex is not a gnu program -- never was and never will be. It's distributed under a BSD-style license, not the GPL. Nothing should be done to foster the utterly false notion that Flex is associated with GNU in any way.

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    I agree with you completely, but a) we needed a retag, b) Adobe Flex is more popular now, so no one wanted to retag it, and c) any retag of [flex] should still have "flex" in the tag - no one does searches for [fast-lexer] . See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23959/… for why this retag happened.
    – Super Long Names are Hilarious
    Oct 21, 2009 at 4:32
  • Ah, thanks -- I missed that thread. I'll admit that [fast-lexer] (or something on that order) wouldn't be very useful, but it seems to me that [BSD-Flex] would be entirely reasonable.
    – Jerry Coffin
    Oct 21, 2009 at 4:40
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    I (personally) think it's reasonable to retag [flex] to [adobe-flex] because after about April of 2008 (when it was started) Stack Overflow honors historical precedent, but before then it honors "whatever was most popular at April 2008" which is complete bogus, especially in 5 years when Adobe Flex all but disappears for some new technology and flex/bison are still being used by people learning compilers.
    – Super Long Names are Hilarious
    Oct 21, 2009 at 5:01
  • The Adobe flex tag has a logo on it. I don't know why but is this a commercial arrangement? Flex the lexer has been around for much longer.
    – delete
    Oct 21, 2009 at 15:01
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    Well, Flex will be anyway. I dream of the day that developers realize that Bison was originally basically a beta product. The "real" compiler-compiler from the same author is byacc, a much better, cleaner program in general. Gnu's maintenance has turned Bison from a piece of dirt into a barnacle-encrusted piece of dirt. Byacc is hardly maintained, because it doesn't need constant fixing of a fundamentally flawed product. But that's not really topical here, so I'll shut up now...
    – Jerry Coffin
    Oct 21, 2009 at 15:02