flex snapshot/beta

[W. L. Estes]

Hi folks,

In preparation for an upcoming release of flex, I have put out a
snapshot of the current flex source tree. I know that there are some
more things we want to have done before we make an official release,
but I want to see how the process is going to work and begin getting
feedback on the current code.

To that end:

ftp://ftp.uncg.edu/people/wlestes/

Houses a snapshot of the current code. It's a checkout of the cvs tree
so you have to:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make

to get a binary and such that you can test.

Patches, comments etc. are all welcome.

Note that not everything in the cvs tree will be going out in the
distribution. That's probably one of the biggest areas that needs
attention before the release. (For you automake enthusiasts, "make
dist" will be what goes into the distribution.)

John Millaway has done tremendous amounts of work on flex for which I
thank him greatly.

Enjoy the new code, NEWS entries appended below.

--Will

* version 2.5.6

** command-line option parsing happens differently now:

*** Added long option parsing

*** Options -n and -c, previously deprecated, now simply do nothing

*** Options are now parsed left to right

** added a number of new options

*** All positive %options are now accessible from the command line

*** Added option -D, to define a preprocessor symbol.

*** Added option --header=FILE to specify a C .h file to generate.

*** added option --yywrap to call yywrap on EOF

*** added option --yylineno to track line count in yylineno

*** --yyclass=NAME name of C++ class when generating c++ scanners

*** for long option names which are associated with existing short
options, see accompanying documentation

** Support for reentrant C scanners has been added.

*** Updated the manual with the new reentrant API.

*** Two new options %option reentrant (-R) and 
%option reentrant-bison (-Rb).

*** All globals optionally placed into struct yyglobals_t.

*** All access to globals replaced by macro invocations.

*** All functions optionally take one additional
argument, yy_globals.

*** New style for invoking reentrant scanner:
yylex_init(void** scanner );
yylex( scanner );
yylex_destroy( scanner );

*** Added get/set functions for members of struct yy_globals_t.
e.g.,  yyget_text, yyget_leng, etc.

*** Prefix substitution added for new functions.

*** Macro shortcuts to the lengthy get/set functions
provided for use in actions. e.g.,  yytext, yyleng, etc.

*** Arbitrary, user-defined data, "yyextra", may be added to scanner.

** %option nomain no longer implies %option yywrap.
But the inverse is still true.

** Developer test suite added.

*** TESTS/ directory has been added. Users can 
'make check' in the TESTS directory to execute the test suite.

** Support for bison variables yylval and yylloc added.

** automake support for the build process

** manual is now in texinfo/info format

*** flex.1 removed from distribution

** flex no longer generates C-language scanners with C++-style
   comments

** flex now generates scanners in c++ which are compatible with
   recent c++ compilers

** flex input scanner now recognizes '\r' as an EOL character