Re: redundant merges for GLR

[Joel E. Denny]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Joel E. Denny wrote:

> On Fri, 29 Jul 2005, Joel E. Denny wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Joel E. Denny wrote:
> >
> > > I am attempting to use bison's %glr-parser and %merge to construct parse
> > > forests.  I'm getting duplicate representations of some trees within the
> > > forest.  Both bison 1.875 and 2.0 give the same results.
>
> I haven't seen any response to my posts last month on problems I'm having
> with bison GLR:
>
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bison/2005-07/msg00013.html
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bison/2005-07/msg00040.html
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bison/2005-07/msg00017.html
>
> Were my explanations unclear?  Am I correct that this is unintended
> behavior?  Should I post these to bug-bison instead?
>
> I need these problems resolved for my work, so I may start exploring
> bison's source myself.  However, I don't want to waste my time moving in

I finally got around to this yesterday.  I spent some time exploring
"data/glr.c" from bison-2.0b, and I'm now fairly certain the redundant
parse tree problem is due to a bug in bison.  I haven't explored the other
issues yet.

resolveValue() invokes mergeOptionSets() but doesn't remove the merged
SemanticOption's.  Thus, within `if (yymerge)', resolveAction() and
userMerge() are invoked for each of several identical SemanticOption's.
This produces the redundant trees.

Attached is a patch to "data/glr.c" from bison-2.0b.  It seems to solve
the problem for my test cases.  I have not wrapped my head around your
code completely, so I'm not fully confident that there are no adverse
side-effects.  However, after applying this patch, I found that make check
produced no test failures.  I plan to test much more extensively and will
follow up if I discover problems.

If you would like to add a new test case to ensure this bug does not crop
up again, I posted one earlier on this thread at help-bison.

Joel Denny

glr.c.patch
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