Re: LEX behavior when given "large" automata.

In article <919@ima.ISC.COM> haddock!uunet!uiucdcs!pur-ee!hankd (Hank Dietz) writes:
>I'm very pleased to see many people confirming that what I've
>done and told my students to do is reasonably widely accepted
>(despite not appearing in any compiler textbook I know of)...
>recognizing keywords and identifiers by a single DFA rule and
>then using symbol table lookup techniques to determine the
>type of the lexeme.
>
>My question is simply: what is this technique officially
>called and does anyone know of a formal reference for it?


I don't think it really has a formal name, but it has appeared in at
least one compilers textbook:


"Introduction to Compiler Construction with UNIX"


by Axel T. Schreiner and H. George Friedman, Jr.


I used it in a toy Pascal subset (a really minimal subset) compiler
I wrote for a course last year.


As an aside, the above text is the best guide I have seen to
understanding the UNIX compiler development tools. The authors
provide a number of useful hints, as well as source code that
will improve YACC's error recovery, in the course of developing
a compiler for "small-C", a subset of the C language.
_______________________________________________________________________________
| Chet Ramey chet@mandrill.ces.CWRU.Edu {cbosgd,decvax,sun}!mandrill!chet |
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