Re: Locations suggest -- we're stupid

[Hans Aberg]

At 18:57 +0200 2002/01/03, Nikos Balkanas wrote:
>I am not sure I follow all the fuss.
>IMHO there is a reason why flex treats differently '\n' from everything
>else. Basically I think it is that we should do our own tracking. We can
>have the knowledge of tracking built into our patterns. This is much faster
>than having flex scan yytext for new lines.

I have used both variations, and keeping track of newlines while designing
the lexer is a bother, especially when the grammar is not known beforehand.
So if Flex can do that, it is a help.

If further Flex is slow in doing that, then I think one should try to
figure out why, and then successively remove that.

Even if that optimization is not done, with a Flex newline tracking devise
in hand, one can use that when developing the lexer, and the go in optimize
when the scanning grammar is completed.

  Hans Aberg