flex notes, request, and bugs

[Vern Paxson]

I'll incorporate the notes Esmond mentioned into the upcoming release's
man page, along with a #define to distinguish between flex- and lex-generated
scanners.  Thanks for the suggestions.

Regarding:

> 3. Bug: The pattern
> 
> 	"DATA"([ \n;,])+/("."|[ \n;,])
> 	
> which arises in one of my scripts after name expansion, is incorrectly
> treated as having variable length head & tail & is thus rejected.

While this is a valid bug, it's a bit of a pain to fix.  I was hoping
that it would rarely arise and then in most cases would be easy enough
to work around.  Note that the above pattern can also be written:

	"DATA"([ \n;,])+/[ .\n;,]

which will then be accepted by flex.  I will add the bug to the man page.

> 4. Bug: the following script for 80-column Cobol card images
> gets 'NULL in input' under flex -f or -F, even after the '-f/-F' patch.
> ...

I could not get this bug to repeat.  Esmond, if can you send me more
details regarding the failure (and possibly the flex output file),
I may be able to trace it down.

		Vern

	Vern Paxson				vern at lbl-csam.arpa
	Real Time Systems			ucbvax!lbl-csam.arpa!vern
	Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory		(415) 486-6411