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Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 23:32:02 +0100
From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
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Subject: Re: [TUHS] v7 K&R C
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Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> It's got some perl goodness, regexps are part of the syntax, ....

I got into Unix after perl and I've used it a lot. Back in the 1990s I saw
Henry Spencer's joke that perl was the Swiss Army Chainsaw of Unix, as a
riff on lex being its Swiss Army Knife. I came to appreciate lex
regrettably late: lex makes it remarkably easy to chew through a huge pile
of text and feed the pieces to some library code written in C. I've been
using re2c recently (http://re2c.org/), which is differently weird than
lex, though it still uses YY in all its variable names. It's remarkable
how much newer lexer/parser generators can't escape from the user
interface of lex/yacc. Another YY example: http://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot@dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/
Trafalgar: Cyclonic 6 to gale 8. Rough occasionally very rough in west and
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