LEX and YACC are software development tools used for lexical analysis and parsing. LEX is a lexical analyzer generator that accepts an input specification defining lexical units and associated semantic actions. It generates a translator containing tables of lexical units and tokens. YACC is a parser generator that accepts a grammar specification and actions for the language being compiled. It produces a bottom-up parser that uses shift-reduce parsing. These tools allow programmers to specify the syntax of a language and generate code to analyze programs in that language.