Re: Bison's semantic parsers

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Hans" == Hans Aberg <address@hidden> writes:

Hans> There is another compiler-compiler project in progress, see
Hans> http://www.antlr.org, written in Java, which sports a built-in
Hans> lexical analyzer compiler as well.

There are many modern alternatives to LALR(1) parsing, and LL seems to
be striking back.  But the real question is: will the free software
world use these tools.  After all the free software world still uses
old tools, e.g., the C is still over promoted imho.

OTOH, if there are no alternatives to Bison, nobody will ever switch,
that's for sure :)

Hans> There appears to not have been much progress on Flex the last
Hans> couple of years, the version (flex-2.5.4.1) I got hold of is
Hans> from 1994 or something.  I had to patch up its C++ feature
Hans> because it could not handle namespaces.

Nope, indeed Vern seems also to say he won't work on Flex again.

Vern, could we imagine that Flex be put on the CVS server of the FSF,
subversions.gnu.org?  We could set up a small team who would help you
delegating some tasks related to Flex?  IMHO, there is a lot of +/-
easy work to do just to modernize Flex: updating the configuration
system, revamping the documentation which still has a strong man page
flavor etc.

Hans> Perhaps Bison and Flex should be bundled, or tuned up together.

It's a good but bad idea.  For instance you could also argue that
Autoconf, Automake and Libtool be merged, but if you just observe that
they have totally different evolutions, it becomes infeasible.  While
definitely a seducing idea, it wouldn't work IMHO.