Re: Location revisited, column tracking...

[Hans Aberg]

At 09:11 -0700 2002/07/25, John Millaway wrote:
> The best part of column tracking
>is that bison does half the work for you! The other half of the work
>requires thankless fiddling with line/column counters in flex
>actions.

I think that Flex needs to have options for tracking the position both in
terms of (lines, column) pairs as well as in terms of stream-position
numbers, in view of that the parser that Flex generates has its own buffer
that makes that location tracking difficult. So one should not have to
worry about Flex buffer setups, but be able to simply extract the position
at need.

The stream-position number will be needed for IDE's (integrated development
environments) and other software that addresses the files by file position
and not by lines & columns.

The computing fakirs can merely avoid invoking the location tracking
options(s), and implement it by hand.

Could we not agree that the Flex development team seems willing to
implement those location tracking options, some users do want them as well,
and those that will not need the location tracking feature will not suffer
from its presence as they do not need to use it, in which case Flex will
generated a parser freed from location tracking?

  Hans Aberg