[talk] lex start conditions.

[R. Clayton]

It's van Wyk's thesis work under Knuth on Ideal, a constraint-based little
language for describing pictures, so I'm guessing it's from whatever they had
going at Stanford in the late '70s.  I'm hoping it's a common-knowledge idiom
that has subsided into obscurity over time, and I'm trying to find long-timer
who will look at it and say "Oh yeah, that...".

I've got the v7 lex source, but I want to avoid as much software archaeology as
possible (sez the person trying to resurrect 40-year-old software).  I've
looked at the flex-generated code and it's baffling to me; maybe the
lex-generated code will be simpler, but I though I might do everything else
before I do the right thing, as Churchill said.

Thanks for your reply.