Christopher Kings-Lynne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Parsing is a whole nother ball of wax besides lexing.
> Forgive my lameness, but I've never truly figured out where parsing ends > and lexing begins. Anyone care to illuminate me on the difference? The theoretical answer is that you can do lexing with a finite-state machine, but parsing generally requires a stack, because it supports nested constructs. Lexers don't have any way to describe nested constructs --- a series of tokens is the only level of abstraction there is. The practical answer is that you do one with flex and the other with bison ;-). If you can do it with flex, and not cheat by implementing your own state stack, it's lexing. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])