Re: Latest Flex 2.6 code & doc

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 address@hidden wrote:

> (1) The new code uses fork/wait/pipe, and the Windows
> people don't like that.

Let's try to be precise here: the not-POSIX people don't like that.
Windows may be the single most massive representative of that class, but
it's not the only one.  There's DOS, OS/2, and lots of others, too.

Flex used to be extremely portable up to now --- as should be expected of
a tool that only has to read and write some plain text files to do its
job.  A change to using Unix-flavour asynchronous subprocesses and piping
would change that rather massively.

> (2) The new code uses GNU m4, and the BSD people don't like that.

Does it really need _GNU_ m4, or would any decent m4 implementation do?
Given that flex itself is not a GNU program, I would find the former
alternative worrying, even though I don't have any BSD system.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (address@hidden)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.