Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!mouse
From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: State Machines (was Re: gotos)
Message-ID: <1103@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: 16 May 88 08:04:05 GMT
References: <1945@sugar.UUCP>
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 20
Posted: Mon May 16 04:04:05 1988

In article <1945@sugar.UUCP>, peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> I submit that there is one case where gotos are no worse and possibly
> better than the alternative.  And that is state machine type code, as
> is found in lexers.

Ideally, one should use a real lexer language.  If you have C on the
target machine, and you have a UNIX machine available for development,
and you are scanning out of a string (as opposed to a stdio stream), I
have something which may be able to help.  It takes input describing
something like a finite state machine (it isn't quite a vanilla FSM, as
one might encounter in a theory class) and produces C code to implement
it.  It was patterned after the VMS lib$tparse facility, but is
somewhat more powerful.

Mail if interested,

					der Mouse

			uucp: mouse@mcgill-vision.uucp
			arpa: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu