[erlang-questions] Start Conditions in Lexical Analyzer Generator (leex)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 20/01/2014, at 11:06 PM, Dmitry Kolesnikov wrote:
> Instead of porting flex input rules, I would take a look into flex interim results and try to map them to leex.  

Or better still, take a step _right_ back and look at
the basic problem.  Sometimes programmers using Lex or
Flex use start conditions when they don't need to.
PL/I-style comments are a good example of this.
It's _easier_ to process them using start conditions,
but it's _possible_ to process them without.

Using start conditions:

>         "/*"         BEGIN(comment);
> 
>         <comment>[^*\n]*        /* eat anything that's not a '*' */
>         <comment>"*"+[^*/\n]*   /* eat up '*'s not followed by '/'s */
>         <comment>\n             ++line_num;
>         <comment>"*"+"/"        BEGIN(INITIAL);

Not using them:

"/*"[^*]*"*"+([^/*][^*]*"*"+)*"/" { line_num += count_nls(yytext); }