Hi,
I have been confused by this statement in the Dennis Ritchie's manual:
"If the input stream has been parsed into tokens up to a given character, the next token is taken to include the longest
string of characters which could possibly constitute a token."
What does this mean? It is under the Lexical Convention section of the manual.
Thanks
We say that the matching is greedy. For example, given the expression a+++b, we break it into the tokens a, ++, + and b rather than a, +, ++ and b.
Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart WayOriginally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
To extend what laserlight said, it means that if more than one match is possible for the next sequence of characters, then use the longest one.
The rule is actually rather critical, as it causes the sequence of characters 'abc' to be parsed as the single identifier 'abc', instead of the identifier 'a' followed by identifier 'b' followed by identifier 'c'.
Code://try //{ if (a) do { f( b); } while(1); else do { f(!b); } while(1); //}
Thank you laserlight and brewbuck for your responses. That answers my question.
