Re: lex/flex incompatabilities

In article 91-10-019 cadreor!neil@uunet.uu.net (Neil Van Dyke) writes:
> jk@cs.man.ac.uk (John Kewley ICL) writes:
> >Apart from yywrap (needs undefing if defined) what other problems might I
> >have with flex/lex compatibility.
...
> - Flex groups expansions by placing parenthesis, so
> NAME [A-Z][A-Z0-9]*
> %%
> foo{NAME}? printf("Matched.\n");
> will match "foo" in Flex, but not in Lex.


On the other hand, probably the single biggest compatibility
mistake for me is that


        - Flex doesn't understand the beginning-of-line operator "^"
        or end-of-line operator "$" inside parens -- including the
        implicit parens resulting from expansion -- so
LABEL ^[A-Z][A-Z0-9]*
COMMENT ";".*$
                %%
                {LABEL} printf("Matched.\n");
{COMMENT} printf("Comment.\n");
        will match the lines "FOO" or "; comment" in LEX but not in
        FLEX.


I must admit that I do this almost every time I write a FLEX
scanner, and then spend an hour or so trying to figure out what
the heck happened.


FLEX is still about a 1000% improvement over LEX. Thanks much
to Vern and the rest for their great work!


Bart Massey
bart@cs.uoregon.edu


P.S. -- When do we get released FLEX bits that build C code
instead of tables for the automata? I've been eagerly awaiting
this one...
--

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