Hm as an re2c user, I always thought that Ragel vs. re2c was a push/pull issue (though re2c flag has a --storable-state flag to generate the push style -- I hav

Hm as an re2c user, I always thought that Ragel vs. re2c was a push/pull issue (though re2c flag has a --storable-state flag to generate the push style -- I haven't used it) But now that I look at the example on the front page: http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/ http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/ action dgt { printf("DGT: %c\n", fc); } action dec { printf("DEC: .\n"); } number = ( [0-9]+ $dgt ( '.' @dec [0-9]+ $dgt )? I don't like how the dgt and dec actions are "inline" in the regex. This seems to be breaking the key abstraction of regexes, which in my mind is "NON-DETERMINISM for free". The better mechanism is submatch extraction, which re2c supports, and they even wrote a 2017 paper about - https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.08837 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.08837 , also see https://re2c.org/ https://re2c.org/ (I don't use re2c submatch extraction in https://www.oilshell.org https://www.oilshell.org, but I just used in a brand new program, and it works great. Very easy and natural.) So I think Ragel is doing something Perl-ish and recasting regular languages as imperative. But that can be asymptotically slower and breaks reasoning by sets, forcing you to reason by stepping through code.