How to in Python

[MartinRinehart at gmail.com]

If I get to add multi-line strings today, I'll have a complete
tokenizer. Interior looks a lot like C minus semi-colons. (Though I
did figure out that there wasn't any need for tokens that didn't come
from a real to have a doubleValue field. In C++ or Java all the Tokens
had a doubleValue, because one needed it.)

Theory: there are some problems which, by their nature, end up looking
a lot like C, regardless of language.

I wrote a Perl-to-HTML pretty-printer. It lets you embed HTML in
comments and creates a table of contents hyperlinked to the individual
functions. It's at http://www.MartinRinehart.com , output and source
code, in the Articles section.

I started with a Perl-style solution: regex for the chars left of "#"
and for the chars to the right. One line of Perl. Nice, except that it
won't work when applied to itself. It will split the line based on the
"#" in the regex, of course. Kludged around that, but then met "#"
embedded in strings, "#" embedded in regex passed to functions, ...

Ended up marching down the input line, one character at a time, like a
C program.