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From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: LEX rule, anyone???
Message-ID: <1989Dec7.193738.9829@twwells.com>
Date: 7 Dec 89 19:37:38 GMT
References: <601@vice2utc.chalmers.se> <224@bohra.cpg.oz> <1989Dec6.180833.2985@twwells.com> <616@chem.ucsd.EDU>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 19

In article <616@chem.ucsd.EDU> tps@chem.ucsd.edu (Tom Stockfisch) writes:
: In article <1989Dec6.180833.2985@twwells.com> bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
:
: >... start states are not reliable with lex. After
: >being bitten by them for the n'th time, I switched to flex.
:
: I know of a bug that involves variable length trailing contexts (this
: happens in flex, too), but I've never run into a bug with start states.
: Can you give specifics?

I don't know what triggers it, but, in certain cases, an RE that
is in some start state gets recognized, even when the program is
not in that start state. I've been bitten by this one three
times, on three different machines (a VAX, a Sun, and a '386), so
it appears to be a generic problem with lex.

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Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
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