Lex programming tool

Have you ever played a game of "mad libs?" Where you fill in the blanks with specific words to create a silly story? That's kind of what lex programming tool does, except instead of filling in the blanks with words, you fill in the blanks with code.

Lex is like a tool that helps you create instructions for a computer. It's kind of like teaching a robot how to understand human language. You tell the tool what words (or patterns) you want it to look for, and what to do when it sees those words.

For example, let's say you want to write a program that can recognize people's names in a text file. You could use lex to tell the computer that if it sees a word capitalised at the start of a sentence, followed by some more words and a full stop, then it should count that as a person's name.

Lex is really helpful because it saves you a lot of time and effort in writing out all those instructions by hand. Instead, you can use pre-made rules and patterns to help you.

Overall, lex helps simplify a really complicated process of teaching the computer to recognise patterns in text by creating "rules" that the computer can follow.