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From: Jan Ziak <0xe2.0x9a.0x9b@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Parallel scanning, was How can the speed of a scanner be independent of the number of rules?
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022 11:18:41 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: Compilers Central
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On Thursday, March 24, 2022 at 6:26:21 PM UTC+1, Jan Ziak wrote:
> [Is there anything published about parallel scanning? I'd think it'd be
> inherently sequential since you don't know the state for a character
> until you've processed all the previous characters. -John]

The belief that "scanning is inherently sequential since you don't
know the state for a character until you've processed all the previous
characters" is false for most programming languages (BASIC, Go, XML,
etc) for most real-world source codes.

-atom
[Well, OK, if I'm scanning XML and break it up into chunks to scan in parallel, how
do I know whether I'm inside a CDATA block?  Or are you just saying you can do
clumps of a few characters at a time?  Again, some sort of reference rather than
just claiming it's possible would be a help. -John]