Compiler-compilers are tools that are used to produce a parser from, essentially, a grammar.

The most famous examples of such tools are Lex and Yacc.

• Lex is a lexical analyzer: it transforms a stream of characters into a stream of tokens. Valid tokens are described eg. with regular expressions.
• Yacc (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) is a parser generator: from a grammar-like description, it generates a parser with semantic actions

Usually present on Unix distributions nowadays are Flex (Faster, newer lex) and Bison, a backwards-compatible rewrite of Yacc. By force of habit, though, they're still often referred to as Lex and Yacc.

These tools have been around for a while (since the 70s/80s), but are still very commonly used in C/C++ projects. From the Lex manual:

"The asteroid to kill this dinosaur is still in orbit."

• JFlex and CUP, written with the goal of resembling Lex and Yacc
• JavaCC, Example: JavaCC partial parser description of the while language.
• SableCC. Can (semi-)automatically generate a class hierarchy representing the syntax trees.
• ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition)