Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!spdcc!ima!compilers-sender
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Lex surrogates
Message-ID: <3342@ima.ima.isc.com>
Date: 16 Feb 89 11:10:11 GMT
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>>The stuff lex puts in yytext[] also changes for each terminal, and hence
>>also must be saved immediately if you want to use it.  I don't understand
>>why the lack of copying makes a practical difference.
>
>In a FAST scanner, every machine instruction counts...

Agreed, and I think FLEX does the right thing by not copying -- there
never was a good reason for it, except that LEX was a quick hack that
didn't ever get worked over properly for performance.

The original discussion was about how it affected the programming
semantics, not the performance, though, which is why I said what I did.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
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