Re: Featuritism

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Akim" == Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

Akim> Flex can provide two different services:

Akim> 1. computation of the location.

Akim> I think there is just no hope to achieve this goal: the very
Akim> definition of a location is just too dependent of the language
Akim> you consider.  In addition, not all users need the same location
Akim> definition.

In the wide range of possible definition of locations I forgot one
important: some scanners include yytext (well, a copy, of course) in
the position, so that when they output an error message, they also
include the text of the error:  

~/src/gawk % gawk 'BEGIN {error+}'                               nostromo Err 1
gawk: cmd. line:1: BEGIN {error+}
gawk: cmd. line:1:              ^ parse error

One such example is GNU AWK.  The scanner is written by hand and it
keeps the whole current line, but the idea applies equally.