[ragel-users] Newbie question: Scanners?

[Adrian Thurston]

Hi Andrew,

Scanners are suitable for processing streams of tokens. Generally this
is any input that can be broken down into a list of items taken from a
pool of possibilities.

You can also use a scanner for its backtracking features. They are
useful in cases where you want to attempt one pattern and should that
fail you would like to match some other pattern against a shorter string.

Regards,
 Adrian

AndrewO wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm pretty new to FSMs, so this is probably an obvious question: when
> would you use a scanner over a standard machine?  Is it just for being
> able to backtrack if you're going to have ambiguity?  Or is it deeper
> than that?
> 
> Sorry if this has been covered elsewere.
> 
> Thanks,
> Andrew O'Brien
> 
> 
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