Re: What do you use bison for?

[Panayiotis Karabassis]

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On 06/04/2011 03:00 PM, Adam Smalin wrote:
> I was wondering what you guys use bison for? I am writing my own programming
> language with it and its insanely complex (hard to do)
> I kind of doubt many ppl are writing their own languages and i am pretty
> sure i seen a json parser created by using bison.
> 
> What do you use bison for?

I *do* use it to write my own programming language, sort of.

Well it is an implementation of the programming language Tony (after
Tony Hoare of quicksort fame), designed by my professor for a compilers'
course at my university. It is sort of a Pascal clone with lists and
garbage collection, and I believe it is Turing complete. It is kind of a
boring language though.

Yes, it is insanely complex. Do you have any guidance? The best book on
the subject is the Dragon Book, now republished in its second edition,
but even so it is very difficult. I have been working on it for almost a
year, long past the deadline, thanks to my understanding professor.

The most awkward part was getting the project set-up with a C++ parser
and lexer, Autotools and libgc for garbage collection. Now it's done
though, these facilities are really helping me make quick progress.

Anyway I've almost finished the stage of intermediate code generation
(quadruples). Only code optimizations and translation to assembly left,
and I'll have a working compiler! :-)

- -- 
Best regards,
    Panayiotis Karabassis
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