just curious

[Henry Cejtin]

Lex tables makes sense.  I'm surprised you are thinking of using your regexp
library for the lexer.  When ever I have worked on things like this I always
wrote the lexer by hand.  It was faster, smaller and just as easy.  The point
being that the lexical structure of languages was rather simple and ad-hoc.
Even Mathematica, which was pretty goofy.  The C lexxer I wrote was no larger
than the lex lexer it replaced, way faster and more readable.
I don't think that regular expressions, although sufficient, are really needed
for this kind of stuff.  I don't know about ML's, lexical structure, but I
wouldn't think that it would be any different.