slow lex????

[Daniel Heiserer]

Hi,
I don't know if this is the right forum for a question about lex/flex,
but I think there are enough experts here to give me a short answer.
 I used lex for the first time writing a file-translater for finite
element modells. I scan about 50MB and it was incredible slowly for
reading (20 minutes). Did I make an error? In the O'Reilly book I have
there is mentioned, that lex/flex is probably the fastest lexer one
could write by its own. (Is this true only if i have lots of regexps or
what?)

Currently I am absolutely dissapointed by the speed of lex. I scanned
another file format with 80MB/20s with my own parser. 

Can anybody give me a hint. Are there certain things I should know? 
Does lex do a lot of caching or does he read the stuff item by item?

Thanks 
                        daniel


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Daniel Heiserer, BMW AG, Knorrstrasse 147, 80788 Muenchen
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