5.3 Example 3

This time, I wrote a program that uses floating point number representation. Because I need to port the program to an architecture that has very inefficient floating point math implementation, I need to change all the computations to use fixed point instead.

One of the tasks is to locate all the occurances of floating point literal constant. This can be done by using the search command as follows:

Here’s an explanation:

• * means any number of the previous atom, including 0
• \(\) is a grouping of pattern. This way, we can treat the entire thing as one atom.
• \+ means one or more of the previous atom.
• \. is just the period, it is escaped because a single dot has a special meaning.
• \d means one digit.
• \? means 0 or 1 of the previous atom.
• \| is a separator of alternative patterns