compiler doubt

Question

The number of tokens in the following expression is what?
+ * * * < = & > { - + + + } ( >> ) + & &

Comments

Sudsho if it was ++++ we would have taken ++ and ++ as two tokens and not +.am I right or wrong?

---

yes right..longest matching rule is followed everytime....why this happening?
because we give all the regular expressions for keywords,identifiers,operators etc in the beginning itself to our lexical analyser...it will do patttern matching thereafter...

---

okay..:)