Re: Looking for a nail

[John Prevost <prevost@maya.com>]

Accidentally sent this as a personal reply.  Here it is to the list.

Ian T Zimmerman <itz@transbay.net> writes:

> >  - adding start conditions a la flex to ocamllex
> 
> I haven't thought of this really hard, but I bet there is already a
> way to do that.  If there isn't, I would think hard again to find a
> cleaner, more functional (less stateful) way to do it.  If the current
> condition is kept in a global as in flex, that just drops again the
> reentrancy that Christian has been working so hard to achieve.

The current condition already exists in ocamllex--this is what the
rule name is equivalent to.  The one thing it doesn't do is support
the idea that some regexp -> action specs should be in more than one
rule--which is no real great loss.

I think making the languages of ocamllex and ocamlyacc slightly nicer
wouldn't be entirely out of order, as would writing them in Caml
rather than C.

John.