ANNOUNCE: Alex version 2.0

[Simon Marlow]

I am pleased to announce version 2.0 of Alex, the lexical analyser
generator for Haskell.

Based on Chris Dornan's original version of Alex, this new version
contains some significant changes:

  - A revised syntax, more closely matching that of lex and Happy.

  - A rewritten back-end, producing smaller, faster, lexers.

  - A more flexible programmer interface, allowing simple
    tokenisers to be produced with very little code, and allowing
    monads to be threaded through the lexer.

Read the release notes for the full story:

  http://www.haskell.org/alex/doc/html/about.html#RELNOTES

This version has been tested on GHC: I have a development version of
GHC using an Alex lexer, which beats the orignal hand-optimised lexer.

Distributions can be obtained from Alex's new home:

  http://www.haskell.org/alex/

Alex is now distributed under a BSD-style license.

Share and enjoy,

Simon Marlow:  simonmar@microsoft.com
Chris Dornan:  cdornan@arm.com
Isaac Jones:   ijones@syntaxpolice.org