Opinions on lex and yacc thus far....

[Henry Spencer]

> So far, everyone agrees that:
> 
> 1)	lex is slow because it is so general.

Not quite true:  lex is slow because its implementation is poor.  Van
Jacobson of LBL gave a paper at Usenix a year ago observing that if one
reimplemented lex for speed, it could consistently outrun hand-cooked
scanners.  Unfortunately, his paper didn't make it into the proceedings,
and he appears to have broken his promise to post it to the net.
-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
condemned to reinvent it, poorly.    | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry