tail recursion

[OGLHacker]

Hello,

I've been fooling around with flex and bison for a while now, and I'm currently 
trying to put together a VRML file parser.  I want it to create and initialize 
C++ objects in a scene graph, so the parser needs to understand C++.

My problems started when I began to read in non-trivial files and I encountered 
a parser stack overflow.  The problem seems to have two parts.

First, I discovered that the stack depth was not being updated in accordance 
with the YYMAXDEPTH constant.  I'm not sure, but it looks like YYSTACK_RELOCATE 
does not get #define'd if C++ is used.  Does this mean I need to define my own 
yyoverflow() method?  If so, how do I do that?  I looked everywhere for 
documentation and can't find any.  This problem is not TOO serious, though, in 
that I can redifine YYINITDEPTH to cover it. 

But ...

The more serious problem is with right recursion in the syntactical definitions 
of the grammar.  I want to parse a list of vertices that could be arbitrarily 
long (depending on the file used for input).  The production is typical:

       vertex_list : vertex ',' vertex_list ;

No matter how big I make the stack, some file will eventually make it overflow. 
 I'm thinking (hoping) that there may be some routine means of overcoming the 
tail recursion.  I know I'm not the first person to encounter it :)  I've tried 
everthing I can think of, including consulting the dragon book.  If there's a 
way, and you know what it is, please share it with me.

Thanks for your help,

Graham

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