Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!ig!arizona!rupley
From: rupley@arizona.edu (John Rupley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Want a way to strip comments from a
Summary: This one fails, too
Message-ID: <9833@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 89 08:34:32 GMT
References: <7150@siemens.UUCP> <9900010@bradley> <4896@cbnews.ATT.COM> <852@lynx.zyx.SE>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 29




In article <852@lynx.zyx.SE>, pem@spunk.zyx.SE (Per-Erik Martin) writes:
> Here's another example in C. It *is* a piece of cake (15 minutes work).
> The problem can be described with a simple automata which is easily coded
> in in C (with goto's, >yech<). I've tested it on most of the pathological
> examples given in this group and it seems to work.

This one fails, too.  Try:

	/***/ hi there /**/

Goes to show, for a quick and clean coding of a pattern-matching
automaton, think Lex.  The Lex source that was posted is so simple it
would be hard to get the logic wrong.  Two out of two C postings suggest
that it may be easier to err in coding the same automaton in C.

Not to imply that C has no advantages -- following comparison is for
size of source and for time of uncommenting main.c of an emacs distribution:

	timex/real   wc -l
	13.95	     10    eatLex.l	Lex  
	2.53	     37    eatC.c	C code that works
	1:27.13	     78    eat.sed	Maarten L's recently posted sed script
					(more lines than the C code :-) :-)

John Rupley
rupley!local@megaron.arizona.edu