Re: [Flex-devel] [Flex-help] Suggestions for improving Flex

[Aaron S. <aa...@se...>]

Replying back onto the flex-devel mailing list, so that we can track  
the conversation. There are definitely some cases where if you're not  
playing by the (often unwritten) rules of writing a flex grammar, the  
code will bite you. Polishing edges is very welcome!

On Oct 3, 2008, at 2:42 PM, Joe Krahn wrote:

> Aaron Stone wrote:
>> There's active maintenance right now, but not active development.  
>> That's just a function of available time and not a function of lack  
>> of interest -- although the C++ side could use a serious C++  
>> programmer's input. The current maintainers are all C programmers.
>> Aaron
> ...
> I program mostly in C, but am trying to use it with C++ right now.  
> However, there are a lot of problems that are not limited to just C++.
>
> For example, the --main and --nomain flags don't work. It appears  
> that Flex moved away from manual skeleton processing to using the m4  
> preprocessor instead, and the conversion is sort of only half  
> completed. The --main option flags set a cpp macro, but the skeleton  
> only honors the m4 macro.

Oh, that's no good.

>
> Similarly, the skeleton file has some header sections marked with  
> m4_ifdef, and some marked with %ok-for-header and %not-for-header.  
> There are also a few unmatched %if sections, which only succeeds  
> because someone added an extra push-true at the beginning of  
> skelout().
>
> I can make an attempt at working on some improvements, but any sort  
> of update will surely lead to errors, even if it is best for the  
> long run.

There are pretty good tests in the tree, so feel free to (carefully)  
mess with things and post patches to the list and/or to sourceforge  
bugs.

>
> Maybe I should just proceed with some experimental code updates,  
> post my initial results, and see what people think?

For sure!

Aaron