Misuse of lex

[Henry Spencer]

> We gave up on lex a long time ago.  We wrote a replacement tool...
> one-third the size of the equivalent lex-produced code and runs twice
> as fast.  Look out for a paper in a forthcoming issue of Software-
> Practice and Experience that describes mkscan in more detail.

Also look at the proceedings of the winter Usenix conference for an
abstract (sigh, the paper didn't get in) of a talk by Van Jacobson of
LBL, explaining how to speed up lex so its scanners are faster than even
the best hand-cooked C code.  Van said he was going to post his paper to
mod.sources; hope it shows up soon.
-- 
"We must choose: the stars or	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
the dust.  Which shall it be?"	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry