Minimisation question

[Colin Fleming]

Hi all,

I'm working on a grammar for parsing XML, according to the XML BNF
here: http://www.jelks.nu/XML/xmlebnf.html. The grammar is obviously
fairly complex, and when I tried to compile it Ragel would just keep
allocating memory until it ran out. I figured it should be possible to
keep the complexity of the machine low by minimising every time you
join two machines, and lo and behold I noticed in the code that
there's a minimizeEveryOp flag, set with the (hidden) -e command line
flag. With this flag it seems to do a great job, and it seems to
produce roughly the same machine for the part that I could actually
compile without that flag. Is there any reason not to use it?

Cheers,
Colin