To: Vladimir Alexiev <vladimir@cs.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Re: flex: how to control start condition from parser?
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 26 Jan 1998 05:50:16 PST.
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 22:45:37 PST
From: Vern Paxson <vern>

> It seems useful for the parser to be able to tell the lexer about such
> context dependencies, because then they don't have to be limited to
> local or sequential context.

One way to do this is to have the parser call a stub routine that's
included in the scanner's .l file, and consequently that has access ot
BEGIN.  The only ugliness is that the parser can't pass in the state
it wants, because those aren't visible - but if you don't have many
such states, then using a different set of names doesn't seem like
to much of a burden.

While generating a .h file like you suggests is certainly cleaner,
flex development has come to a virtual stand-still :-(, so a workaround
like the above is much more pragmatic than waiting for a new feature.

		Vern