Re: is lex useful?

As to whether flex or hand-coded scanners are better, the authors
of _lex & yacc_ claim to have reported much faster resorts, as do
the manuals for flex, on the basis that flex doesn't suffer from
having more patterns unless back-tracking takes place. The flex
manuals give a great example with `wc' clones.


Along with the additional readability, I don't see why anyone
wouldn't use flex, aside from really bizzare syntax requirements
in a particular application. In the aforementioned book, another
of the authors noted that Fortran 77 was too bizzare for flex.
[Yup, that's what I said. Fortran needs a multi-pass lexer to correctly
recognize that REAL*4HELLO doesn't contain the string constant 'ELLO'. -John]
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