I find scanner generator technology very interesting (and also _very_ complex). On top of that, it's devastatingly undocumented and seemingly unmaintained. As the paper on γ-GLA quickly concludes: _"Writing an efficient lexical analyzer for even a simple language is not a trivial task..."_ * "re2c Home":http://re2c.org/ -- a tool for writing very fast and very flexible scanners * "Queχ -- Fast Universal Lexical Analyzer Generator":http://quex.sourceforge.net/