Re: Help, searching for a yacc group, is there one?

[David Fang]

> > I know this is the help-bison group, but I can't find a yacc group
> > for my problem, and I want to do the basics in yacc, before I move on
> > to learning bison (mainly for the C++ support).
>
> Why'd you want to learn writing parsers with yacc? bison basically implements
> everything that yacc does/did in pretty much the same way, so start your
> learning with bison straight away.

My $.02 on the matter: I still make sure my .yy (C++) parser files work
with traditional yacc because it is more stable in the sense that I have
not seen much development on yacc in years (or have I just not found it?)
whereas bison is constantly growing and changing, mostly for better.
I've spent a little effort making sure my sources work from bison versions
1.35 through 2.3 (I gave up on 1.28...).  And yes, the machines I've
surveyed and frequently use to build my projects span that many versions,
so I feel the need to cover all my bases.  Of course, the downside to
making it work through old versions is not being able to take advantage of
the newer features, unless I spin-off differently configured versions of
the yacc-source.  I'd place more money on a yacc source working with
bison, than a bison source working with yacc, but that really depends on
what features you choose to use.  In any case, learning yacc can't hurt,
and might help with understanding the bison internals.  End of $.02.


Fang