[Flex-help] flex: input rules are too complicated (>= 32000 NFA states)

[Clement W. <cl...@ya...>]

i ran into this error message:

"flex: input rules are too complicated (>= 32000 NFA states)"

My question is:  why is there a limit of 32000?

it seems like 32 bit machines are the rule, so old 16 bit dependencies 
should go away, or at least be optional.


Or perhaps flex is the wrong tool?  Flex has been working fine until I 
hit this limit.

I have a large number of prefix pattterns followed by a smaller numer of 
strings that I want to extract:

{PATTERN_1}({EXTRACTION_1})
{PATTERN_2}({EXTRACTION_1})
...
{PATTERN_51}({EXTRACTION_2})
{PATTERN_52}({EXTRACTION_2})
...
{PATTERN_101}({EXTRACTION_3})

In the perl world, I would have just used the variable $1 to get the 
submatch.  Of course, perl would be horribly inefficient, since since 
the code would have to be a series of if-then-else-if's (on top of perl 
being an interpreter...)

in the flex world, I have:

{PATTERN_1}               BEGIN(extraction_1);

<extraction_1>{EXTRACTION_1}   extract_1(yytext);
etc.

Many thanks in advance,
Clem