Want a way to strip comments from a

[John Rupley]

In article <852 at lynx.zyx.SE>, pem at 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 at megaron.arizona.edu