1 From phr Tue Jul 8 10:36:19 1986
2 Date: Tue, 8 Jul 86 00:52:24 EDT
4 To: riferguson%watmath.waterloo.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA, tower
5 Subject: Re: Bison documentation?
7 The main difference between Bison and Yacc that I know of is that
8 Bison supports the @N construction, which gives you access to
9 the starting and ending line number and character number associated
10 with any of the symbols in the current rule.
12 Also, Bison supports the command `%expect N' which says not to mention
13 the conflicts if there are N shift/reduce conflicts and no reduce/reduce
16 The differences in the algorithms stem mainly from the horrible
17 kludges that Johnson had to perpetrate to make Yacc fit in a PDP-11.
19 Also, Bison uses a faster but less space-efficient encoding for the
20 parse tables (see Corbett's PhD thesis from Berkeley, "Static
21 Semantics in Compiler Error Recovery", June 1985, Report No. UCB/CSD
22 85/251), and more modern technique for generating the lookahead sets.
23 (See Frank DeRemer and Thomas Pennello, "Efficient Computation of
24 LALR(1) Look-Ahead Sets", ACM Transactions on Programming Languages
25 and Systems (TOPLAS) 4, 4 (October 1982), 615-649. Their
26 technique is the standard one now.)
29 free software foundation
32 [DeRemer-Pennello reference corrected by Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>,