Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncc!myrias!mj
From: mj@myrias.UUCP (Michal Jaegermann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Flex follies
Keywords: flex, lex, compilation
Message-ID: <1248@myrias.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jun 89 15:34:21 GMT
Organization: Myrias Research, Edmonton
Lines: 23


   Last night I spent some time playing with ST version of flex, which
was recently posted in comp.sys.binaries.atari.st.  My input file was
rather simple, since it contained only one line - namely '%%'.  All
different options seem to work as advertised, produced code looks
reasonably C like; and that where a problem starts.  It looks like
that an author of the port gave us a "compiler killer" instead of a
lexical analyzer generator.  On a created code Sozobon blew up almost
immediately with an addressing exception and without any message.
Alcyon choked on long macro names - since it quietly truncates them
to first 8 characaters.  But even a manual intervention into the code,
in order to shorten these guys, didn't help very much.  The compiler
got totally confused anyway, but did not crashed. (No, I did not really
think that it would work - on the other hand maybe I missed something).
At this moment I went to bed.
   Any other experience with different ST compilers?  Do we have any
prayer on this side of gcc? It was fun anyway.  I do not remember ever
producing so many kilobytes of code so fast. :-)

Michal Jaegermann
Myrias Research Corporation
Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA
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