Comment recognition in Lex, agai - (nf)

[johnl at haddock.UUCP]

#R:watmath:-766600:haddock:16800012:000:685
haddock!johnl    May  7 14:28:00 1984

The problem with recognizing comments as single Lex tokens is that Lex
has a finite sized token buffer.  If your comments are bigger than the
buffer, you lose.

What should work is to put in a COMMENT start state and do this:

"/*"            BEGIN COMMENT;  /* start a comment */

<COMMENT>"*/"   BEGIN 0;        /* return to regular state */

<COMMENT>.|\n   ;               /* throw everything else away */

Unfortunately, I've never had much luck with making lex programs that
include start states work.  Everybody lets lex recognize the /* and
writes C code to eat the comment; if you read the manual page for lex,
you'll find exactly that in the example.

John Levine, ima!johnl