Re: GNU Bison off the endangered-species list

[John Aycock]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 04:15:36PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> As luck would have it, Paul Hilfinger recently contributed a GLR
> parser to the Bison project, and this is now part of the current Bison
> version

Hi, Paul.  That's great news about the GLR parser; having one bundled
with Bison will dramatically expand the number of people exposed to
general parsers.  I look forward to trying it out!

> if you can make
> further suggestions for improving Bison we'd very much appreciate
> hearing about them.

Biased suggestion: implement support for Schrödinger's Token (see the
paper in Software -- Practice & Experience 31, 8 (2001), pp. 803-814).

Unbiased suggestion: I'm not sure what flavor of the GLR algorithm
you're using, but some have (fixable) problems with some grammars.  Offhand,
I'd check infinite recursion (A -> A) and hidden left recursion.

I'll pass along this info about Bison to some other people who work in
this area.

John