Effect on the language

In order to be even reasonably reusable, YAFL's compilation process has been made as simple as possible. This shows in a few places:

YAFL supports Ada-like comments; running from a double dash "--" to the end of the line. Such comments can be easily linked together, and attached to the previous or to the next significant token.
The YAFL compiler generates intermediate C code. Such a code generator is significantly easier to understand and to modify than a native code generator.
YAFL's lexical definition has been adapted to avoid the need for a lookahead character whenever possible. For instance, most of the compilation literature refers to the Pascal range as an example where the lexical analyzer must use a lookahead to distinguish between a real number ("1.7") and a couple of integers in a range ("1..7"). In order to avoid this problem, YAFL uses a keyword instead of the double-dot notation to specify ranges.