Lex Yacc / Flex Bison variables - interpreter

Question

I was just wondering how any of you guys would implement multi character variables in c using Flex and Bison / Lex and Yacc ?
Any if so can you provide maybe a simple example?
I am attempting to write an interpreter for a language and I can't seem to find a good way to implement variables, so far the methods I've tried have either failed or causing the execution of any program with a lot of variables become really so (I mean it could take minutes to execute a program that just assigns 1000 variables and does nothing else)
Thanks for your time,
Francis

Answer 1

In a lexer provided by ADAIC for Ada the following method is used, i find it ver useful for lexing multu-character literals such as reserved words and variables. It (along with corresponding Bison grammar and some other stuff) is available at ADAIC docs
%%
[a-zA-Z](_?[a-zA-Z0-9])* return(lk_keyword(yytext));
%%
# define NUM_KEYWORDS 69
KEY_TABLE key_tab[NUM_KEYWORDS] =
{
{"ABORT", ABORT},
{"ABS", ABS},
....
....
....
};
lk_keyword(str)
char *str;
{
int min;
int max;
int guess, compare;
min = 0;
max = NUM_KEYWORDS-1;
guess = (min + max) / 2;
to_upper(str);
for (guess=(min+max)/2; min<=max; guess=(min+max)/2) {
if ((compare = strcmp(key_tab[guess].kw, str)) < 0) {
min = guess + 1;
} else if (compare > 0) {
max = guess - 1;
} else {
return key_tab[guess].kwv;
}
}
return identifier;
}