Talk:GNU Bison

What this page needs

This page needs a few things, IMHO:

• Description on Bison's history, its makers, and who is using it right now (the programming language Ruby is created using bison, for instance)
  • --Michael.shebanow (talk) 02:27, 27 December 2015 (UTC): I know bison is older than 1988. IIRC, I was working with Bob Corbett on it in 1984 (grad student @ Berkeley at the time). I worked on a derivative of it I called camel, adding basically work from Bob's thesis (semantic-based error recovery). His thesis was published in 1985 (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1985/5514.html).
• A piece of grammar, and a text to explain that grammar (some stuff could be found a the Introduction to Bison

I started a "Who is using it" section. It lacks a lot of real-world usage, though. Espadrine (talk) 13:07, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

More Explanation

Agreeing with the above, I believe more explanation of where it stands in the whole perspective of the parsing process. It says it is used along with flex, but what role to each play with each other.

jptdrake 18:11, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Circumstance hereby elects you to do improve this in a small or large way. Gronky 19:00, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree that just describing it as "a parser generator" is ambiguous. This article does already say that flex is an automatic lexical analyzer, but it does not state explicitly that Bison generates a semantic analyzer. I think that defining the two concepts (lexical and semantic) and making a corresponding distinction between Bison and Flex is critical to the explanation of Bison. I however am not sure of the correct terminology and I cannot find a good resource to cite. Sam Tomato (talk) 20:50, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Word play

Yak / bison, now I got it. --Abdull (talk) 10:37, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I notice that the source of the name is not mentioned anywhere in the article. I would think that the above is correct and it is a play on yacc/yak, but I can't find any sources that explicitly say so. Are there any? - Paul Richter (talk) 04:43, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

http://www.developer.com/net/cplus/article.php/3642516/Classic-Parsing-with-Flex-and-Bison.htm would suffice. Probably there are no authoritative sources TEDickey (talk) 09:21, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

You might find this helpful: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DontExplainTheJoke TEDickey (talk) 09:39, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

AFAIK yacc stands for "Yet another compiler compiler". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.112.247.209 (talk) 19:24, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

GCC

This current article states that "GCC" once used Bison but later switched. However, the provided reference (a mailing list post made before the work even happened) only refers GCC's C++ front-end and specifically states that (at the time) they had no intention of replacing the C parser.

I haven't taken the time to research whether or not Bison was replaced wholesale or just for C++. However, What "GCC" actually refers to should probably be clarified and matched with a more appropriate reference. -- Craigbarnes85 (talk) 09:43, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Is Bash's distribution of generated files special?

In the list of applications using Bison, I removed this from the entry about Bash:

• It is distributed with Bison-generated files.

I guess this is referring to distributing Bash's source code. I.e. Bash probably distributes the C files generated by Bison so that others can recompile Bash without having to have a compatible version of Bison installed. (This is in addition to Bash distributing the parser source code that gets fed into Bison, as required by the GPL.)

AFAIK, this is common practice, so it should be a general comment in the article rather than just being attached to Bash. I'll do that now. Just wanted to leave a note in case I'd misunderstood. Can someone reply to say I've got this right/wrong? Gronky (talk) 23:19, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

bash's use of bison

A quick check of bash 4.1's source shows that while it is distributed with parse.c and parse.h generated by bison, it is not using any bison-specific features. So the "use" is only superficial (and unless commented on more explicitly, the tie-in can be removed). TEDickey (talk) 23:25, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for checking that. I went ahead and wrote a section about this: GNU_bison#Licence_and_distribution_of_generated_code.

BTW, I remember us talking on a Talk page previously, could be one or three years ago, and I said I'd fix up an article about a free software package, but I never did. Can you remember which one? Gronky (talk) 00:11, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

That was this, and I did merge them. TEDickey (talk) 00:25, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Wow, I can't believe that discussion was 5 years ago. Thanks for doing the merger. Gronky (talk) 00:31, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

no problem (time goes rapidly...) TEDickey (talk) 00:48, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, interesting. Gronky (talk) 00:19, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Technically, bash can work with byacc output as well (though the reason for not doing that is unrelated to license issues). TEDickey (talk) 00:25, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

I've described the problem I saw: GNU_bison#Where_is_it_used.3F

But I don't know what byacc is, so it could be incomplete or even wrong. Gronky (talk) 00:31, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Berkeley Yacc TEDickey (talk) 00:39, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

For what it's worth, byacc implements %pure_parser, and (though the source implementation is deliberately slightly different), can replace bison on some of those uses (not all). (I see that you noted that). TEDickey (talk) 08:05, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

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Please give some credits...

...and informations about the initial author of this tool. You could do this in a history section - which would be cool. It´s an important open source tool helping programmers around the world for decades and it's still being used. It's author demands to be listet in this encyclopedia. 91.89.26.15 (talk) 23:18, 18 April 2020 (UTC)