Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ziggy!usfvax2!tct!chip
From: chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: User Definable Character Classes
Message-ID: <260176EA.C58@tct.uucp>
Date: 16 Mar 90 23:29:46 GMT
References: <15253@bfmny0.UU.NET> <7420@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Organization: ComDev/TCT, Sarasota, FL
Lines: 26

According to lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall):
>I'm looking carefully at ways to integrate better argument parsing with
>regular expressions.  Right now it's not possible to, say, swap the
>second and third arguments of a function call, at least not with complete
>generality.  You need to have some means of tokenizing, and rejecting
>commas and right parens that are inside parens or quotes or comments, or,
>depending on the language, after backslashes or dollar signs.

Sounds like a job for:

	lex.pl

:-)

What we could use here is a full-blown lexical analyis engine
integrated into the Perl language.

For example, the RCS file format is an ASCII stream with "@"
delimeters, where "@@" means a literal "@".  I've often wondered how
to write Perl to interpret such a file without calling getc thousands
of times.

Then again, if I want flex, I know where to find it.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg at ComDev/TCT   <chip%tct@ateng.com>, <uunet!ateng!tct!chip>
          "The Usenet, in a very real sense, does not exist."