top | item 13984850

(no title)

thedaniel | 9 years ago

The name is a reference to Alan Kay's M.Sc thesis from 1968: https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html

discuss

order

Sir_Cmpwn|9 years ago

Alan Kay's Flex quickly became Smalltalk while Flex (the lexer) spent the last 30 years doing its thing under that name. It might not be deliberate but it's definitely confusing and they definitely should have realized it would clash within the compiler development namespace. It's like making an HTML parser and calling it Chrome.