Why is flex pattern-matching of NULs slow?

Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com>
Sat, 9 Apr 2022 21:40:45 +0300

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Why is flex pattern-matching of NULs slow? costello@mitre.org (Roger L Costello) (2022-04-08)
Why is flex pattern-matching of NULs slow? christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com (Christopher F Clark) (2022-04-09)
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From: Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2022 21:40:45 +0300
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 22-04-001
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Keywords: lex, i18n, comment
Posted-Date: 09 Apr 2022 16:19:41 EDT

I haven't looked at Flex in a while either, but what I remember is
that 0 is used as end of buffer and EOF indication and that you had to
validate against that. I don't recall whether that required an
attempt at reading or not. It wouldn't surprise me if it were used as
a flag also, and for a "null pointer". Depending upon how you look at
it, C either hates 0 or loves it, but it is very often "special".


But if you are parsing human readable ASCII text, having 0 (NUL) be an
EOF mark is actually not a bad solution. If I recall correctly, that
isn't even a bad choice for human readable UTF-8 (including
non-latin-1 texts, because 2 and 3 byte sequences don't have NULs in
them). It only becomes a pain if you want to parse binary data.


By the way, in our lexer, we used -1, i.e. what getc used to return
for EOF for the same condition and I don't recall how we put it in the
buffer (or whether we even did). Being ex-PL/I and Pascal
programmers, we used strings with lengths in many places instead of C
strings. I don't remember whether we used Paul Abrahams clever hack
to put the length at the end of the string which if done right also
serves as a null byte for use as C strings.


--
******************************************************************************
Chris Clark email: christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com
Compiler Resources, Inc. Web Site: http://world.std.com/~compres
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Berlin, MA 01503 USA twitter: @intel_chris
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[You're right about UTF-8, where NUL is also a reasonable string terminator.
UTF-8 is self-synchonizing -- the bytes of no UTF-8 code point are a prefix
or suffix of any other code point. -John]


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