Re: CC Mode 5.27 (C); Bison mode not mentioned

[Martin Stjernholm]

"Robert J. Chassell" <bob@megalith.rattlesnake.com> wrote:

> Although CC mode supports Bison and YACC, neither are mentioned in
> cc-mode.el
> 
> I think this is because almost everyone (including me) thinks of Bison
> as an integral part of C.  But I have been in correspondence with a
> programmer who did not think this and who, as a consequence, thought
> momentarily that Emacs did not support Bison.
> 
> The problem could be solved by a brief mention of Bison and YACC in
> the commentary to cc-mode.el and in the documentation for the `c-mode'
> function.

Well, I haven't thought that CC Mode supports yacc/bison well enough
to mention it as a supported language, even less add a major mode
called yacc-mode without tweaking the syntax recognition rules a bit
first.

Of course, I wouldn't mind taking patches that added a decent
yacc-mode. But until then, if anyone want to use C mode to edit yacc
files it's up to them to switch to it, knowing full and well that it's
intended for a different language. Perhaps it could mentioned
somewhere in the doc that C mode works fairly well to edit the C
blocks in yacc files, but otoh I think that's pretty obvious.

So the bottom line is that if there's a yacc-mode, or a default
binding for .y files to C mode, the expectations of the support for
that language will be higher than the code currently measures up to.