Re: lilypond grammar in the contributor guide

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

> We have a dump of the bison grammar in the contributor guide (see
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/contributor/lilypond-grammar).
>
> Is there any value in keeping this? It complicates the generation, as
> it is a cross-directory dependency.

Much of LilyPond's language has been offloaded to music functions and
the parsing of music function arguments uses synthetic tokens and to a
good degree is directed not as much from the rules but the underlying
actions.

As an end user tool, it reflects far too little of what the input
language of LilyPond is about.  And it does not contain enough to work
with when placed, say, in the CG.  While one might want to think about
whether the responsible scripts could in any useful manner be
contributed to Bison (after all, Texinfo is the official GNU
documentation language), for LilyPond itself it does no longer make much
sense in my opinion.

It allows interpreting the output of -ddebug-parser of a binary
corresponding to the version of the NR.  But the complexity of
LilyPond's grammar is such that I would not expect somebody not working
with a full checkout-out source to be likely in a capacity of
interpreting the respective traces of Bison.

-- 
David Kastrup