bpf_asm returns single ' on compile

I am new to Berkeley Packet Filter . I am trying to learn how to hand roll my own bpf code and then compile it using the bpf_asm. I am working on ubuntu 16.04 with kernel 4.4.0-137. I have downloaded the source code and I am working my way through the recommended reading, in Documentation/networking, specifically [filter.txt][1]. I have install binutils, built and installed bpf_asm located in tools/net using the provided makefile. Everything to this point appears to have gone okay. When I run bpf_asm -c bpf_example the program produces a single ' mark to standard out. The code I am trying to compile is the sample code provided in Documentation/networking/filter.txt I am including it here for completeness.

  ld [4]                  /* offsetof(struct seccomp_data, arch) */
  jne #0xc000003e, bad    /* AUDIT_ARCH_X86_64 */
  ld [0]                  /* offsetof(struct seccomp_data, nr) */
  jeq #15, good           /* __NR_rt_sigreturn */
  jeq #231, good          /* __NR_exit_group */
  jeq #60, good           /* __NR_exit */
  jeq #0, good            /* __NR_read */
  jeq #1, good            /* __NR_write */
  jeq #5, good            /* __NR_fstat */
  jeq #9, good            /* __NR_mmap */
  jeq #14, good           /* __NR_rt_sigprocmask */
  jeq #13, good           /* __NR_rt_sigaction */
  jeq #35, good           /* __NR_nanosleep */
  bad: ret #0             /* SECCOMP_RET_KILL_THREAD */
  good: ret #0x7fff0000   /* SECCOMP_RET_ALLOW */

The output that is mentioned in filter.txt is

$ ./bpf_asm -c foo
{ 0x28,  0,  0, 0x0000000c },
{ 0x15,  0,  1, 0x00000806 },
{ 0x06,  0,  0, 0xffffffff },
{ 0x06,  0,  0, 0000000000 },

However, my output is

./bpf_asm -c bpf_example
'

I am clearly messing something up. Can someone point out what I have overlooked, provide suggestions for things to try, or provide additional literature supplementary to filter.txt? Thank you.

Edit

After reading the code more carefully I found that bpf_exp.y was invoking yyerror. With a message "lex unknown character", which I find somewhat strange since I yanked the text from filter.txt directly into a new file. Playing with bpf_exp.l I found some strange behavior in the production for ., which is used to catch any output that is not caught by the rest of the lexer and output an error. Commenting those out... which is probably a terrible idea, I was able to produce bpf output. However, it isn't equivalent to what filter.txt suggests as the output. It does however contain the same number of lines as the bpf that was input and after running it through the bpf_dbg program I recovered the same output that I input. Is this program no longer maintained? Or I am still not using it correctly? Furthermore, it would seem very difficult for the input bpf program in filter.txt to be output as the suggested program since I don't believe the parser has any sort of optimization for the output code. Hence it would seem like it needs to have the same number of line. Is that a correct assumption?