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I am teaching (with others) a relatively introductory course in computer science for IT professionals without a background in CS. Since I developed the course materials on automata and grammars, I am also responsible for teaching about compilers and compiler construction.
Years ago, when I studied compilation in college, all our examples came from Lex and Yacc. Are these still in widespread use? Is there something that is more commonly used for Java? The students are proficient in C and Java but have never used parser generators.
Any tips on what to teach would be appreciated
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A parser generator is a good tool that you should make part of your toolbox. A parser generator takes a grammar as input and automatically generates source code that can parse streams of characters using the grammar.
Java Compiler Compiler (JavaCC) is the most popular parser generator for use with Java applications. A parser generator is a tool that reads a grammar specification and converts it to a Java program that can recognize matches to the grammar.
Structure of a Parser A complete parser is usually composed of two parts: a lexer, also known as scanner or tokenizer, and the proper parser. The parser needs the lexer because it does not work directly on the text, but on the output produced by the lexer.
Education-wise, writing your own parser will teach you more than using a generator. You have to write more and more complicated code after all, plus you have to understand exactly how you parse a language.
Antlr is widely used, well documented, and free. It is supported by Ant, and can target Java among many other languages.
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