On the third hand, I'm really loathe to add more gimmicks to stinking regexps. But, on the fourth hand, no alternative yet has proven popular enough to move away from those suckers.
if-you-can't-get-a-new-car-at-least-tune-up-the-old-one-ly y'rs - tim
Right. Actually, if it helps, i'm working on porting re2c to python. Because it was written properly, it's rather simple (in fact, i've only needed to modify one file, add some if's to ee if we want python generation, and output the python code instead of c code) The lexers it generates for c/C++ are much faster than flex lexers, because they are directly coded. I haven't benchmarked it against SPARK yet, but i would imagine it would blow it away, for the same reason it blows away flex. --Dan