Re: Bison no longer builds with K&R C.

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Akim Demaille <address@hidden>
> Date: 16 Oct 2002 08:36:05 +0200
>
> | I propose that we officially discontinue support for building Bison with
> | K&R C.
>
> This is fine with me, unless the problem is in Automake: they want to
> keep maintaining ansi2knr, so if the problem was there, we ought to
> know what went wrong.

No, the problems were independent of ansi2knr.  Here are the
first three problems with Bison 1.75 that Peter Klein reported
for SunOS 4.1.4 cc:

  "./quotearg.c", line 631: no automatic aggregate initialization
  "./quotearg.c", line 631: operands of = have incompatible types
  "./quotearg.c", line 639: no automatic aggregate initialization
  "./quotearg.c", line 639: operands of = have incompatible types

  "./xstrndup.c", line 38: syntax error at or near type word "char"

  "./abitset.c", line 904: syntax error at or near word "union"
  "./abitset.c", line 905: syntax error at or near symbol (
  "./abitset.c", line 906: syntax error at or near word "struct"

At that point he gave up, and I don't blame him.  It's just not worth
the maintenance effort any more.


> Also, GCC does keep the K&R requirement, although in a limited form
> (IIRC the stage 1 compiler must compile with a K&R compiler).  I
> suspect that the bitset lib must remain K&R.

That's OK: we can run it through ansi2knr before giving it to the GCC
folks.  This is safe so long as we continue stick to a subset of ANSI
C that will safely become K&R C after being passed through ansi2knr.


> Did you have any news from its author?

Not since his patch of 2002-10-04.