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1 GNU Bison NEWS
2
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
4
5 Bison no longer executes user-specified M4 code when processing a grammar.
6
7 ** Future Changes
8
9 In addition to the removal of the features announced in Bison 2.6, the
10 next major release will remove the "Temporary hack for adding a semicolon
11 to the user action", as announced in the release 2.5. Instead of:
12
13 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3 };
14
15 write:
16
17 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3; };
18
19 ** Bug fixes
20
21 *** Type names are now properly escaped.
22
23 *** glr.cc: set_debug_level and debug_level work as expected.
24
25 *** Stray @ or $ in actions
26
27 While Bison used to warn about stray $ or @ in action rules, it did not
28 for other actions such as printers, destructors, or initial actions. It
29 now does.
30
31 ** Type names in printers and destructors
32
33 For consistency with rule actions, it is now possible to qualify $$ by a
34 type-name in printers and destructors. For instance:
35
36 %printer { fprintf (yyo, "(%d, %f)", $<ival>$, $<fval>$); } <*> <>;
37
38 will display two values for each typed and untyped symbol (provided
39 that YYSTYPE supports it).
40
41 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.6 (2012-07-19) [stable]
42
43 ** Future Changes
44
45 The next major release of Bison will drop support for the following
46 deprecated features. Please report disagreements to bug-bison@gnu.org.
47
48 *** K&R C parsers
49
50 Support for generating parsers in K&R C will be removed. Parsers
51 generated for C support ISO C90, and are tested with ISO C99 and ISO C11
52 compilers.
53
54 *** Features deprecated since Bison 1.875
55
56 The definitions of yystype and yyltype will be removed; use YYSTYPE and
57 YYLTYPE.
58
59 YYPARSE_PARAM and YYLEX_PARAM, deprecated in favor of %parse-param and
60 %lex-param, will no longer be supported.
61
62 Support for the preprocessor symbol YYERROR_VERBOSE will be removed, use
63 %error-verbose.
64
65 *** The generated header will be included (yacc.c)
66
67 Instead of duplicating the content of the generated header (definition of
68 YYSTYPE, yyparse declaration etc.), the generated parser will include it,
69 as is already the case for GLR or C++ parsers. This change is deferred
70 because existing versions of ylwrap (e.g., Automake 1.12.1) do not support
71 it.
72
73 ** Generated Parser Headers
74
75 *** Guards (yacc.c, glr.c, glr.cc)
76
77 The generated headers are now guarded, as is already the case for C++
78 parsers (lalr1.cc). For instance, with --defines=foo.h:
79
80 #ifndef YY_FOO_H
81 # define YY_FOO_H
82 ...
83 #endif /* !YY_FOO_H */
84
85 *** New declarations (yacc.c, glr.c)
86
87 The generated header now declares yydebug and yyparse. Both honor
88 --name-prefix=bar_, and yield
89
90 int bar_parse (void);
91
92 rather than
93
94 #define yyparse bar_parse
95 int yyparse (void);
96
97 in order to facilitate the inclusion of several parser headers inside a
98 single compilation unit.
99
100 *** Exported symbols in C++
101
102 The symbols YYTOKEN_TABLE and YYERROR_VERBOSE, which were defined in the
103 header, are removed, as they prevent the possibility of including several
104 generated headers from a single compilation unit.
105
106 *** YYLSP_NEEDED
107
108 For the same reasons, the undocumented and unused macro YYLSP_NEEDED is no
109 longer defined.
110
111 ** New %define variable: api.prefix
112
113 Now that the generated headers are more complete and properly protected
114 against multiple inclusions, constant names, such as YYSTYPE are a
115 problem. While yyparse and others are properly renamed by %name-prefix,
116 YYSTYPE, YYDEBUG and others have never been affected by it. Because it
117 would introduce backward compatibility issues in projects not expecting
118 YYSTYPE to be renamed, instead of changing the behavior of %name-prefix,
119 it is deprecated in favor of a new %define variable: api.prefix.
120
121 The following examples compares both:
122
123 %name-prefix "bar_" | %define api.prefix "bar_"
124 %token <ival> FOO %token <ival> FOO
125 %union { int ival; } %union { int ival; }
126 %% %%
127 exp: 'a'; exp: 'a';
128
129 bison generates:
130
131 #ifndef BAR_FOO_H #ifndef BAR_FOO_H
132 # define BAR_FOO_H # define BAR_FOO_H
133
134 /* Enabling traces. */ /* Enabling traces. */
135 # ifndef YYDEBUG | # ifndef BAR_DEBUG
136 > # if defined YYDEBUG
137 > # if YYDEBUG
138 > # define BAR_DEBUG 1
139 > # else
140 > # define BAR_DEBUG 0
141 > # endif
142 > # else
143 # define YYDEBUG 0 | # define BAR_DEBUG 0
144 > # endif
145 # endif | # endif
146
147 # if YYDEBUG | # if BAR_DEBUG
148 extern int bar_debug; extern int bar_debug;
149 # endif # endif
150
151 /* Tokens. */ /* Tokens. */
152 # ifndef YYTOKENTYPE | # ifndef BAR_TOKENTYPE
153 # define YYTOKENTYPE | # define BAR_TOKENTYPE
154 enum yytokentype { | enum bar_tokentype {
155 FOO = 258 FOO = 258
156 }; };
157 # endif # endif
158
159 #if ! defined YYSTYPE \ | #if ! defined BAR_STYPE \
160 && ! defined YYSTYPE_IS_DECLARED | && ! defined BAR_STYPE_IS_DECLARED
161 typedef union YYSTYPE | typedef union BAR_STYPE
162 { {
163 int ival; int ival;
164 } YYSTYPE; | } BAR_STYPE;
165 # define YYSTYPE_IS_DECLARED 1 | # define BAR_STYPE_IS_DECLARED 1
166 #endif #endif
167
168 extern YYSTYPE bar_lval; | extern BAR_STYPE bar_lval;
169
170 int bar_parse (void); int bar_parse (void);
171
172 #endif /* !BAR_FOO_H */ #endif /* !BAR_FOO_H */
173
174 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.1 (2012-06-05) [stable]
175
176 ** Future changes:
177
178 The next major release will drop support for generating parsers in K&R C.
179
180 ** yacc.c: YYBACKUP works as expected.
181
182 ** glr.c improvements:
183
184 *** Location support is eliminated when not requested:
185
186 GLR parsers used to include location-related code even when locations were
187 not requested, and therefore not even usable.
188
189 *** __attribute__ is preserved:
190
191 __attribute__ is no longer disabled when __STRICT_ANSI__ is defined (i.e.,
192 when -std is passed to GCC).
193
194 ** lalr1.java: several fixes:
195
196 The Java parser no longer throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the
197 first token leads to a syntax error. Some minor clean ups.
198
199 ** Changes for C++:
200
201 *** C++11 compatibility:
202
203 C and C++ parsers use "nullptr" instead of "0" when __cplusplus is 201103L
204 or higher.
205
206 *** Header guards
207
208 The header files such as "parser.hh", "location.hh", etc. used a constant
209 name for preprocessor guards, for instance:
210
211 #ifndef BISON_LOCATION_HH
212 # define BISON_LOCATION_HH
213 ...
214 #endif // !BISON_LOCATION_HH
215
216 The inclusion guard is now computed from "PREFIX/FILE-NAME", where lower
217 case characters are converted to upper case, and series of
218 non-alphanumerical characters are converted to an underscore.
219
220 With "bison -o lang++/parser.cc", "location.hh" would now include:
221
222 #ifndef YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH
223 # define YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH
224 ...
225 #endif // !YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH
226
227 *** C++ locations:
228
229 The position and location constructors (and their initialize methods)
230 accept new arguments for line and column. Several issues in the
231 documentation were fixed.
232
233 ** liby is no longer asking for "rpl_fprintf" on some platforms.
234
235 ** Changes in the manual:
236
237 *** %printer is documented
238
239 The "%printer" directive, supported since at least Bison 1.50, is finally
240 documented. The "mfcalc" example is extended to demonstrate it.
241
242 For consistency with the C skeletons, the C++ parsers now also support
243 "yyoutput" (as an alias to "debug_stream ()").
244
245 *** Several improvements have been made:
246
247 The layout for grammar excerpts was changed to a more compact scheme.
248 Named references are motivated. The description of the automaton
249 description file (*.output) is updated to the current format. Incorrect
250 index entries were fixed. Some other errors were fixed.
251
252 ** Building bison:
253
254 *** Conflicting prototypes with recent/modified Flex.
255
256 Fixed build problems with the current, unreleased, version of Flex, and
257 some modified versions of 2.5.35, which have modified function prototypes.
258
259 *** Warnings during the build procedure have been eliminated.
260
261 *** Several portability problems in the test suite have been fixed:
262
263 This includes warnings with some compilers, unexpected behavior of tools
264 such as diff, warning messages from the test suite itself, etc.
265
266 *** The install-pdf target works properly:
267
268 Running "make install-pdf" (or -dvi, -html, -info, and -ps) no longer
269 halts in the middle of its course.
270
271 * Changes in version 2.5 (2011-05-14):
272
273 ** Grammar symbol names can now contain non-initial dashes:
274
275 Consistently with directives (such as %error-verbose) and with
276 %define variables (e.g. push-pull), grammar symbol names may contain
277 dashes in any position except the beginning. This is a GNU
278 extension over POSIX Yacc. Thus, use of this extension is reported
279 by -Wyacc and rejected in Yacc mode (--yacc).
280
281 ** Named references:
282
283 Historically, Yacc and Bison have supported positional references
284 ($n, $$) to allow access to symbol values from inside of semantic
285 actions code.
286
287 Starting from this version, Bison can also accept named references.
288 When no ambiguity is possible, original symbol names may be used
289 as named references:
290
291 if_stmt : "if" cond_expr "then" then_stmt ';'
292 { $if_stmt = mk_if_stmt($cond_expr, $then_stmt); }
293
294 In the more common case, explicit names may be declared:
295
296 stmt[res] : "if" expr[cond] "then" stmt[then] "else" stmt[else] ';'
297 { $res = mk_if_stmt($cond, $then, $else); }
298
299 Location information is also accessible using @name syntax. When
300 accessing symbol names containing dots or dashes, explicit bracketing
301 ($[sym.1]) must be used.
302
303 These features are experimental in this version. More user feedback
304 will help to stabilize them.
305
306 ** IELR(1) and canonical LR(1):
307
308 IELR(1) is a minimal LR(1) parser table generation algorithm. That
309 is, given any context-free grammar, IELR(1) generates parser tables
310 with the full language-recognition power of canonical LR(1) but with
311 nearly the same number of parser states as LALR(1). This reduction
312 in parser states is often an order of magnitude. More importantly,
313 because canonical LR(1)'s extra parser states may contain duplicate
314 conflicts in the case of non-LR(1) grammars, the number of conflicts
315 for IELR(1) is often an order of magnitude less as well. This can
316 significantly reduce the complexity of developing of a grammar.
317
318 Bison can now generate IELR(1) and canonical LR(1) parser tables in
319 place of its traditional LALR(1) parser tables, which remain the
320 default. You can specify the type of parser tables in the grammar
321 file with these directives:
322
323 %define lr.type lalr
324 %define lr.type ielr
325 %define lr.type canonical-lr
326
327 The default-reduction optimization in the parser tables can also be
328 adjusted using "%define lr.default-reductions". For details on both
329 of these features, see the new section "Tuning LR" in the Bison
330 manual.
331
332 These features are experimental. More user feedback will help to
333 stabilize them.
334
335 ** LAC (Lookahead Correction) for syntax error handling:
336
337 Canonical LR, IELR, and LALR can suffer from a couple of problems
338 upon encountering a syntax error. First, the parser might perform
339 additional parser stack reductions before discovering the syntax
340 error. Such reductions can perform user semantic actions that are
341 unexpected because they are based on an invalid token, and they
342 cause error recovery to begin in a different syntactic context than
343 the one in which the invalid token was encountered. Second, when
344 verbose error messages are enabled (with %error-verbose or the
345 obsolete "#define YYERROR_VERBOSE"), the expected token list in the
346 syntax error message can both contain invalid tokens and omit valid
347 tokens.
348
349 The culprits for the above problems are %nonassoc, default
350 reductions in inconsistent states, and parser state merging. Thus,
351 IELR and LALR suffer the most. Canonical LR can suffer only if
352 %nonassoc is used or if default reductions are enabled for
353 inconsistent states.
354
355 LAC is a new mechanism within the parsing algorithm that solves
356 these problems for canonical LR, IELR, and LALR without sacrificing
357 %nonassoc, default reductions, or state merging. When LAC is in
358 use, canonical LR and IELR behave almost exactly the same for both
359 syntactically acceptable and syntactically unacceptable input.
360 While LALR still does not support the full language-recognition
361 power of canonical LR and IELR, LAC at least enables LALR's syntax
362 error handling to correctly reflect LALR's language-recognition
363 power.
364
365 Currently, LAC is only supported for deterministic parsers in C.
366 You can enable LAC with the following directive:
367
368 %define parse.lac full
369
370 See the new section "LAC" in the Bison manual for additional
371 details including a few caveats.
372
373 LAC is an experimental feature. More user feedback will help to
374 stabilize it.
375
376 ** %define improvements:
377
378 *** Can now be invoked via the command line:
379
380 Each of these command-line options
381
382 -D NAME[=VALUE]
383 --define=NAME[=VALUE]
384
385 -F NAME[=VALUE]
386 --force-define=NAME[=VALUE]
387
388 is equivalent to this grammar file declaration
389
390 %define NAME ["VALUE"]
391
392 except that the manner in which Bison processes multiple definitions
393 for the same NAME differs. Most importantly, -F and --force-define
394 quietly override %define, but -D and --define do not. For further
395 details, see the section "Bison Options" in the Bison manual.
396
397 *** Variables renamed:
398
399 The following %define variables
400
401 api.push_pull
402 lr.keep_unreachable_states
403
404 have been renamed to
405
406 api.push-pull
407 lr.keep-unreachable-states
408
409 The old names are now deprecated but will be maintained indefinitely
410 for backward compatibility.
411
412 *** Values no longer need to be quoted in the grammar file:
413
414 If a %define value is an identifier, it no longer needs to be placed
415 within quotations marks. For example,
416
417 %define api.push-pull "push"
418
419 can be rewritten as
420
421 %define api.push-pull push
422
423 *** Unrecognized variables are now errors not warnings.
424
425 *** Multiple invocations for any variable is now an error not a warning.
426
427 ** Unrecognized %code qualifiers are now errors not warnings.
428
429 ** Character literals not of length one:
430
431 Previously, Bison quietly converted all character literals to length
432 one. For example, without warning, Bison interpreted the operators in
433 the following grammar to be the same token:
434
435 exp: exp '++'
436 | exp '+' exp
437 ;
438
439 Bison now warns when a character literal is not of length one. In
440 some future release, Bison will start reporting an error instead.
441
442 ** Destructor calls fixed for lookaheads altered in semantic actions:
443
444 Previously for deterministic parsers in C, if a user semantic action
445 altered yychar, the parser in some cases used the old yychar value to
446 determine which destructor to call for the lookahead upon a syntax
447 error or upon parser return. This bug has been fixed.
448
449 ** C++ parsers use YYRHSLOC:
450
451 Similarly to the C parsers, the C++ parsers now define the YYRHSLOC
452 macro and use it in the default YYLLOC_DEFAULT. You are encouraged
453 to use it. If, for instance, your location structure has "first"
454 and "last" members, instead of
455
456 # define YYLLOC_DEFAULT(Current, Rhs, N) \
457 do \
458 if (N) \
459 { \
460 (Current).first = (Rhs)[1].location.first; \
461 (Current).last = (Rhs)[N].location.last; \
462 } \
463 else \
464 { \
465 (Current).first = (Current).last = (Rhs)[0].location.last; \
466 } \
467 while (false)
468
469 use:
470
471 # define YYLLOC_DEFAULT(Current, Rhs, N) \
472 do \
473 if (N) \
474 { \
475 (Current).first = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, 1).first; \
476 (Current).last = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, N).last; \
477 } \
478 else \
479 { \
480 (Current).first = (Current).last = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, 0).last; \
481 } \
482 while (false)
483
484 ** YYLLOC_DEFAULT in C++:
485
486 The default implementation of YYLLOC_DEFAULT used to be issued in
487 the header file. It is now output in the implementation file, after
488 the user %code sections so that its #ifndef guard does not try to
489 override the user's YYLLOC_DEFAULT if provided.
490
491 ** YYFAIL now produces warnings and Java parsers no longer implement it:
492
493 YYFAIL has existed for many years as an undocumented feature of
494 deterministic parsers in C generated by Bison. More recently, it was
495 a documented feature of Bison's experimental Java parsers. As
496 promised in Bison 2.4.2's NEWS entry, any appearance of YYFAIL in a
497 semantic action now produces a deprecation warning, and Java parsers
498 no longer implement YYFAIL at all. For further details, including a
499 discussion of how to suppress C preprocessor warnings about YYFAIL
500 being unused, see the Bison 2.4.2 NEWS entry.
501
502 ** Temporary hack for adding a semicolon to the user action:
503
504 Previously, Bison appended a semicolon to every user action for
505 reductions when the output language defaulted to C (specifically, when
506 neither %yacc, %language, %skeleton, or equivalent command-line
507 options were specified). This allowed actions such as
508
509 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3 };
510
511 instead of
512
513 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3; };
514
515 As a first step in removing this misfeature, Bison now issues a
516 warning when it appends a semicolon. Moreover, in cases where Bison
517 cannot easily determine whether a semicolon is needed (for example, an
518 action ending with a cpp directive or a braced compound initializer),
519 it no longer appends one. Thus, the C compiler might now complain
520 about a missing semicolon where it did not before. Future releases of
521 Bison will cease to append semicolons entirely.
522
523 ** Verbose syntax error message fixes:
524
525 When %error-verbose or the obsolete "#define YYERROR_VERBOSE" is
526 specified, syntax error messages produced by the generated parser
527 include the unexpected token as well as a list of expected tokens.
528 The effect of %nonassoc on these verbose messages has been corrected
529 in two ways, but a more complete fix requires LAC, described above:
530
531 *** When %nonassoc is used, there can exist parser states that accept no
532 tokens, and so the parser does not always require a lookahead token
533 in order to detect a syntax error. Because no unexpected token or
534 expected tokens can then be reported, the verbose syntax error
535 message described above is suppressed, and the parser instead
536 reports the simpler message, "syntax error". Previously, this
537 suppression was sometimes erroneously triggered by %nonassoc when a
538 lookahead was actually required. Now verbose messages are
539 suppressed only when all previous lookaheads have already been
540 shifted or discarded.
541
542 *** Previously, the list of expected tokens erroneously included tokens
543 that would actually induce a syntax error because conflicts for them
544 were resolved with %nonassoc in the current parser state. Such
545 tokens are now properly omitted from the list.
546
547 *** Expected token lists are still often wrong due to state merging
548 (from LALR or IELR) and default reductions, which can both add
549 invalid tokens and subtract valid tokens. Canonical LR almost
550 completely fixes this problem by eliminating state merging and
551 default reductions. However, there is one minor problem left even
552 when using canonical LR and even after the fixes above. That is,
553 if the resolution of a conflict with %nonassoc appears in a later
554 parser state than the one at which some syntax error is
555 discovered, the conflicted token is still erroneously included in
556 the expected token list. Bison's new LAC implementation,
557 described above, eliminates this problem and the need for
558 canonical LR. However, LAC is still experimental and is disabled
559 by default.
560
561 ** Java skeleton fixes:
562
563 *** A location handling bug has been fixed.
564
565 *** The top element of each of the value stack and location stack is now
566 cleared when popped so that it can be garbage collected.
567
568 *** Parser traces now print the top element of the stack.
569
570 ** -W/--warnings fixes:
571
572 *** Bison now properly recognizes the "no-" versions of categories:
573
574 For example, given the following command line, Bison now enables all
575 warnings except warnings for incompatibilities with POSIX Yacc:
576
577 bison -Wall,no-yacc gram.y
578
579 *** Bison now treats S/R and R/R conflicts like other warnings:
580
581 Previously, conflict reports were independent of Bison's normal
582 warning system. Now, Bison recognizes the warning categories
583 "conflicts-sr" and "conflicts-rr". This change has important
584 consequences for the -W and --warnings command-line options. For
585 example:
586
587 bison -Wno-conflicts-sr gram.y # S/R conflicts not reported
588 bison -Wno-conflicts-rr gram.y # R/R conflicts not reported
589 bison -Wnone gram.y # no conflicts are reported
590 bison -Werror gram.y # any conflict is an error
591
592 However, as before, if the %expect or %expect-rr directive is
593 specified, an unexpected number of conflicts is an error, and an
594 expected number of conflicts is not reported, so -W and --warning
595 then have no effect on the conflict report.
596
597 *** The "none" category no longer disables a preceding "error":
598
599 For example, for the following command line, Bison now reports
600 errors instead of warnings for incompatibilities with POSIX Yacc:
601
602 bison -Werror,none,yacc gram.y
603
604 *** The "none" category now disables all Bison warnings:
605
606 Previously, the "none" category disabled only Bison warnings for
607 which there existed a specific -W/--warning category. However,
608 given the following command line, Bison is now guaranteed to
609 suppress all warnings:
610
611 bison -Wnone gram.y
612
613 ** Precedence directives can now assign token number 0:
614
615 Since Bison 2.3b, which restored the ability of precedence
616 directives to assign token numbers, doing so for token number 0 has
617 produced an assertion failure. For example:
618
619 %left END 0
620
621 This bug has been fixed.
622
623 * Changes in version 2.4.3 (2010-08-05):
624
625 ** Bison now obeys -Werror and --warnings=error for warnings about
626 grammar rules that are useless in the parser due to conflicts.
627
628 ** Problems with spawning M4 on at least FreeBSD 8 and FreeBSD 9 have
629 been fixed.
630
631 ** Failures in the test suite for GCC 4.5 have been fixed.
632
633 ** Failures in the test suite for some versions of Sun Studio C++ have
634 been fixed.
635
636 ** Contrary to Bison 2.4.2's NEWS entry, it has been decided that
637 warnings about undefined %prec identifiers will not be converted to
638 errors in Bison 2.5. They will remain warnings, which should be
639 sufficient for POSIX while avoiding backward compatibility issues.
640
641 ** Minor documentation fixes.
642
643 * Changes in version 2.4.2 (2010-03-20):
644
645 ** Some portability problems that resulted in failures and livelocks
646 in the test suite on some versions of at least Solaris, AIX, HP-UX,
647 RHEL4, and Tru64 have been addressed. As a result, fatal Bison
648 errors should no longer cause M4 to report a broken pipe on the
649 affected platforms.
650
651 ** "%prec IDENTIFIER" requires IDENTIFIER to be defined separately.
652
653 POSIX specifies that an error be reported for any identifier that does
654 not appear on the LHS of a grammar rule and that is not defined by
655 %token, %left, %right, or %nonassoc. Bison 2.3b and later lost this
656 error report for the case when an identifier appears only after a
657 %prec directive. It is now restored. However, for backward
658 compatibility with recent Bison releases, it is only a warning for
659 now. In Bison 2.5 and later, it will return to being an error.
660 [Between the 2.4.2 and 2.4.3 releases, it was decided that this
661 warning will not be converted to an error in Bison 2.5.]
662
663 ** Detection of GNU M4 1.4.6 or newer during configure is improved.
664
665 ** Warnings from gcc's -Wundef option about undefined YYENABLE_NLS,
666 YYLTYPE_IS_TRIVIAL, and __STRICT_ANSI__ in C/C++ parsers are now
667 avoided.
668
669 ** %code is now a permanent feature.
670
671 A traditional Yacc prologue directive is written in the form:
672
673 %{CODE%}
674
675 To provide a more flexible alternative, Bison 2.3b introduced the
676 %code directive with the following forms for C/C++:
677
678 %code {CODE}
679 %code requires {CODE}
680 %code provides {CODE}
681 %code top {CODE}
682
683 These forms are now considered permanent features of Bison. See the
684 %code entries in the section "Bison Declaration Summary" in the Bison
685 manual for a summary of their functionality. See the section
686 "Prologue Alternatives" for a detailed discussion including the
687 advantages of %code over the traditional Yacc prologue directive.
688
689 Bison's Java feature as a whole including its current usage of %code
690 is still considered experimental.
691
692 ** YYFAIL is deprecated and will eventually be removed.
693
694 YYFAIL has existed for many years as an undocumented feature of
695 deterministic parsers in C generated by Bison. Previously, it was
696 documented for Bison's experimental Java parsers. YYFAIL is no longer
697 documented for Java parsers and is formally deprecated in both cases.
698 Users are strongly encouraged to migrate to YYERROR, which is
699 specified by POSIX.
700
701 Like YYERROR, you can invoke YYFAIL from a semantic action in order to
702 induce a syntax error. The most obvious difference from YYERROR is
703 that YYFAIL will automatically invoke yyerror to report the syntax
704 error so that you don't have to. However, there are several other
705 subtle differences between YYERROR and YYFAIL, and YYFAIL suffers from
706 inherent flaws when %error-verbose or "#define YYERROR_VERBOSE" is
707 used. For a more detailed discussion, see:
708
709 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bison-patches/2009-12/msg00024.html
710
711 The upcoming Bison 2.5 will remove YYFAIL from Java parsers, but
712 deterministic parsers in C will continue to implement it. However,
713 because YYFAIL is already flawed, it seems futile to try to make new
714 Bison features compatible with it. Thus, during parser generation,
715 Bison 2.5 will produce a warning whenever it discovers YYFAIL in a
716 rule action. In a later release, YYFAIL will be disabled for
717 %error-verbose and "#define YYERROR_VERBOSE". Eventually, YYFAIL will
718 be removed altogether.
719
720 There exists at least one case where Bison 2.5's YYFAIL warning will
721 be a false positive. Some projects add phony uses of YYFAIL and other
722 Bison-defined macros for the sole purpose of suppressing C
723 preprocessor warnings (from GCC cpp's -Wunused-macros, for example).
724 To avoid Bison's future warning, such YYFAIL uses can be moved to the
725 epilogue (that is, after the second "%%") in the Bison input file. In
726 this release (2.4.2), Bison already generates its own code to suppress
727 C preprocessor warnings for YYFAIL, so projects can remove their own
728 phony uses of YYFAIL if compatibility with Bison releases prior to
729 2.4.2 is not necessary.
730
731 ** Internationalization.
732
733 Fix a regression introduced in Bison 2.4: Under some circumstances,
734 message translations were not installed although supported by the
735 host system.
736
737 * Changes in version 2.4.1 (2008-12-11):
738
739 ** In the GLR defines file, unexpanded M4 macros in the yylval and yylloc
740 declarations have been fixed.
741
742 ** Temporary hack for adding a semicolon to the user action.
743
744 Bison used to prepend a trailing semicolon at the end of the user
745 action for reductions. This allowed actions such as
746
747 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3 };
748
749 instead of
750
751 exp: exp "+" exp { $$ = $1 + $3; };
752
753 Some grammars still depend on this "feature". Bison 2.4.1 restores
754 the previous behavior in the case of C output (specifically, when
755 neither %language or %skeleton or equivalent command-line options
756 are used) to leave more time for grammars depending on the old
757 behavior to be adjusted. Future releases of Bison will disable this
758 feature.
759
760 ** A few minor improvements to the Bison manual.
761
762 * Changes in version 2.4 (2008-11-02):
763
764 ** %language is an experimental feature.
765
766 We first introduced this feature in test release 2.3b as a cleaner
767 alternative to %skeleton. Since then, we have discussed the possibility of
768 modifying its effect on Bison's output file names. Thus, in this release,
769 we consider %language to be an experimental feature that will likely evolve
770 in future releases.
771
772 ** Forward compatibility with GNU M4 has been improved.
773
774 ** Several bugs in the C++ skeleton and the experimental Java skeleton have been
775 fixed.
776
777 * Changes in version 2.3b (2008-05-27):
778
779 ** The quotes around NAME that used to be required in the following directive
780 are now deprecated:
781
782 %define NAME "VALUE"
783
784 ** The directive "%pure-parser" is now deprecated in favor of:
785
786 %define api.pure
787
788 which has the same effect except that Bison is more careful to warn about
789 unreasonable usage in the latter case.
790
791 ** Push Parsing
792
793 Bison can now generate an LALR(1) parser in C with a push interface. That
794 is, instead of invoking "yyparse", which pulls tokens from "yylex", you can
795 push one token at a time to the parser using "yypush_parse", which will
796 return to the caller after processing each token. By default, the push
797 interface is disabled. Either of the following directives will enable it:
798
799 %define api.push_pull "push" // Just push; does not require yylex.
800 %define api.push_pull "both" // Push and pull; requires yylex.
801
802 See the new section "A Push Parser" in the Bison manual for details.
803
804 The current push parsing interface is experimental and may evolve. More user
805 feedback will help to stabilize it.
806
807 ** The -g and --graph options now output graphs in Graphviz DOT format,
808 not VCG format. Like --graph, -g now also takes an optional FILE argument
809 and thus cannot be bundled with other short options.
810
811 ** Java
812
813 Bison can now generate an LALR(1) parser in Java. The skeleton is
814 "data/lalr1.java". Consider using the new %language directive instead of
815 %skeleton to select it.
816
817 See the new section "Java Parsers" in the Bison manual for details.
818
819 The current Java interface is experimental and may evolve. More user
820 feedback will help to stabilize it.
821
822 ** %language
823
824 This new directive specifies the programming language of the generated
825 parser, which can be C (the default), C++, or Java. Besides the skeleton
826 that Bison uses, the directive affects the names of the generated files if
827 the grammar file's name ends in ".y".
828
829 ** XML Automaton Report
830
831 Bison can now generate an XML report of the LALR(1) automaton using the new
832 "--xml" option. The current XML schema is experimental and may evolve. More
833 user feedback will help to stabilize it.
834
835 ** The grammar file may now specify the name of the parser header file using
836 %defines. For example:
837
838 %defines "parser.h"
839
840 ** When reporting useless rules, useless nonterminals, and unused terminals,
841 Bison now employs the terms "useless in grammar" instead of "useless",
842 "useless in parser" instead of "never reduced", and "unused in grammar"
843 instead of "unused".
844
845 ** Unreachable State Removal
846
847 Previously, Bison sometimes generated parser tables containing unreachable
848 states. A state can become unreachable during conflict resolution if Bison
849 disables a shift action leading to it from a predecessor state. Bison now:
850
851 1. Removes unreachable states.
852
853 2. Does not report any conflicts that appeared in unreachable states.
854 WARNING: As a result, you may need to update %expect and %expect-rr
855 directives in existing grammar files.
856
857 3. For any rule used only in such states, Bison now reports the rule as
858 "useless in parser due to conflicts".
859
860 This feature can be disabled with the following directive:
861
862 %define lr.keep_unreachable_states
863
864 See the %define entry in the "Bison Declaration Summary" in the Bison manual
865 for further discussion.
866
867 ** Lookahead Set Correction in the ".output" Report
868
869 When instructed to generate a ".output" file including lookahead sets
870 (using "--report=lookahead", for example), Bison now prints each reduction's
871 lookahead set only next to the associated state's one item that (1) is
872 associated with the same rule as the reduction and (2) has its dot at the end
873 of its RHS. Previously, Bison also erroneously printed the lookahead set
874 next to all of the state's other items associated with the same rule. This
875 bug affected only the ".output" file and not the generated parser source
876 code.
877
878 ** --report-file=FILE is a new option to override the default ".output" file
879 name.
880
881 ** The "=" that used to be required in the following directives is now
882 deprecated:
883
884 %file-prefix "parser"
885 %name-prefix "c_"
886 %output "parser.c"
887
888 ** An Alternative to "%{...%}" -- "%code QUALIFIER {CODE}"
889
890 Bison 2.3a provided a new set of directives as a more flexible alternative to
891 the traditional Yacc prologue blocks. Those have now been consolidated into
892 a single %code directive with an optional qualifier field, which identifies
893 the purpose of the code and thus the location(s) where Bison should generate
894 it:
895
896 1. "%code {CODE}" replaces "%after-header {CODE}"
897 2. "%code requires {CODE}" replaces "%start-header {CODE}"
898 3. "%code provides {CODE}" replaces "%end-header {CODE}"
899 4. "%code top {CODE}" replaces "%before-header {CODE}"
900
901 See the %code entries in section "Bison Declaration Summary" in the Bison
902 manual for a summary of the new functionality. See the new section "Prologue
903 Alternatives" for a detailed discussion including the advantages of %code
904 over the traditional Yacc prologues.
905
906 The prologue alternatives are experimental. More user feedback will help to
907 determine whether they should become permanent features.
908
909 ** Revised warning: unset or unused mid-rule values
910
911 Since Bison 2.2, Bison has warned about mid-rule values that are set but not
912 used within any of the actions of the parent rule. For example, Bison warns
913 about unused $2 in:
914
915 exp: '1' { $$ = 1; } '+' exp { $$ = $1 + $4; };
916
917 Now, Bison also warns about mid-rule values that are used but not set. For
918 example, Bison warns about unset $$ in the mid-rule action in:
919
920 exp: '1' { $1 = 1; } '+' exp { $$ = $2 + $4; };
921
922 However, Bison now disables both of these warnings by default since they
923 sometimes prove to be false alarms in existing grammars employing the Yacc
924 constructs $0 or $-N (where N is some positive integer).
925
926 To enable these warnings, specify the option "--warnings=midrule-values" or
927 "-W", which is a synonym for "--warnings=all".
928
929 ** Default %destructor or %printer with "<*>" or "<>"
930
931 Bison now recognizes two separate kinds of default %destructor's and
932 %printer's:
933
934 1. Place "<*>" in a %destructor/%printer symbol list to define a default
935 %destructor/%printer for all grammar symbols for which you have formally
936 declared semantic type tags.
937
938 2. Place "<>" in a %destructor/%printer symbol list to define a default
939 %destructor/%printer for all grammar symbols without declared semantic
940 type tags.
941
942 Bison no longer supports the "%symbol-default" notation from Bison 2.3a.
943 "<*>" and "<>" combined achieve the same effect with one exception: Bison no
944 longer applies any %destructor to a mid-rule value if that mid-rule value is
945 not actually ever referenced using either $$ or $n in a semantic action.
946
947 The default %destructor's and %printer's are experimental. More user
948 feedback will help to determine whether they should become permanent
949 features.
950
951 See the section "Freeing Discarded Symbols" in the Bison manual for further
952 details.
953
954 ** %left, %right, and %nonassoc can now declare token numbers. This is required
955 by POSIX. However, see the end of section "Operator Precedence" in the Bison
956 manual for a caveat concerning the treatment of literal strings.
957
958 ** The nonfunctional --no-parser, -n, and %no-parser options have been
959 completely removed from Bison.
960
961 * Changes in version 2.3a, 2006-09-13:
962
963 ** Instead of %union, you can define and use your own union type
964 YYSTYPE if your grammar contains at least one <type> tag.
965 Your YYSTYPE need not be a macro; it can be a typedef.
966 This change is for compatibility with other Yacc implementations,
967 and is required by POSIX.
968
969 ** Locations columns and lines start at 1.
970 In accordance with the GNU Coding Standards and Emacs.
971
972 ** You may now declare per-type and default %destructor's and %printer's:
973
974 For example:
975
976 %union { char *string; }
977 %token <string> STRING1
978 %token <string> STRING2
979 %type <string> string1
980 %type <string> string2
981 %union { char character; }
982 %token <character> CHR
983 %type <character> chr
984 %destructor { free ($$); } %symbol-default
985 %destructor { free ($$); printf ("%d", @$.first_line); } STRING1 string1
986 %destructor { } <character>
987
988 guarantees that, when the parser discards any user-defined symbol that has a
989 semantic type tag other than "<character>", it passes its semantic value to
990 "free". However, when the parser discards a "STRING1" or a "string1", it
991 also prints its line number to "stdout". It performs only the second
992 "%destructor" in this case, so it invokes "free" only once.
993
994 [Although we failed to mention this here in the 2.3a release, the default
995 %destructor's and %printer's were experimental, and they were rewritten in
996 future versions.]
997
998 ** Except for LALR(1) parsers in C with POSIX Yacc emulation enabled (with "-y",
999 "--yacc", or "%yacc"), Bison no longer generates #define statements for
1000 associating token numbers with token names. Removing the #define statements
1001 helps to sanitize the global namespace during preprocessing, but POSIX Yacc
1002 requires them. Bison still generates an enum for token names in all cases.
1003
1004 ** Handling of traditional Yacc prologue blocks is now more consistent but
1005 potentially incompatible with previous releases of Bison.
1006
1007 As before, you declare prologue blocks in your grammar file with the
1008 "%{ ... %}" syntax. To generate the pre-prologue, Bison concatenates all
1009 prologue blocks that you've declared before the first %union. To generate
1010 the post-prologue, Bison concatenates all prologue blocks that you've
1011 declared after the first %union.
1012
1013 Previous releases of Bison inserted the pre-prologue into both the header
1014 file and the code file in all cases except for LALR(1) parsers in C. In the
1015 latter case, Bison inserted it only into the code file. For parsers in C++,
1016 the point of insertion was before any token definitions (which associate
1017 token numbers with names). For parsers in C, the point of insertion was
1018 after the token definitions.
1019
1020 Now, Bison never inserts the pre-prologue into the header file. In the code
1021 file, it always inserts it before the token definitions.
1022
1023 ** Bison now provides a more flexible alternative to the traditional Yacc
1024 prologue blocks: %before-header, %start-header, %end-header, and
1025 %after-header.
1026
1027 For example, the following declaration order in the grammar file reflects the
1028 order in which Bison will output these code blocks. However, you are free to
1029 declare these code blocks in your grammar file in whatever order is most
1030 convenient for you:
1031
1032 %before-header {
1033 /* Bison treats this block like a pre-prologue block: it inserts it into
1034 * the code file before the contents of the header file. It does *not*
1035 * insert it into the header file. This is a good place to put
1036 * #include's that you want at the top of your code file. A common
1037 * example is '#include "system.h"'. */
1038 }
1039 %start-header {
1040 /* Bison inserts this block into both the header file and the code file.
1041 * In both files, the point of insertion is before any Bison-generated
1042 * token, semantic type, location type, and class definitions. This is a
1043 * good place to define %union dependencies, for example. */
1044 }
1045 %union {
1046 /* Unlike the traditional Yacc prologue blocks, the output order for the
1047 * new %*-header blocks is not affected by their declaration position
1048 * relative to any %union in the grammar file. */
1049 }
1050 %end-header {
1051 /* Bison inserts this block into both the header file and the code file.
1052 * In both files, the point of insertion is after the Bison-generated
1053 * definitions. This is a good place to declare or define public
1054 * functions or data structures that depend on the Bison-generated
1055 * definitions. */
1056 }
1057 %after-header {
1058 /* Bison treats this block like a post-prologue block: it inserts it into
1059 * the code file after the contents of the header file. It does *not*
1060 * insert it into the header file. This is a good place to declare or
1061 * define internal functions or data structures that depend on the
1062 * Bison-generated definitions. */
1063 }
1064
1065 If you have multiple occurrences of any one of the above declarations, Bison
1066 will concatenate the contents in declaration order.
1067
1068 [Although we failed to mention this here in the 2.3a release, the prologue
1069 alternatives were experimental, and they were rewritten in future versions.]
1070
1071 ** The option "--report=look-ahead" has been changed to "--report=lookahead".
1072 The old spelling still works, but is not documented and may be removed
1073 in a future release.
1074
1075 * Changes in version 2.3, 2006-06-05:
1076
1077 ** GLR grammars should now use "YYRECOVERING ()" instead of "YYRECOVERING",
1078 for compatibility with LALR(1) grammars.
1079
1080 ** It is now documented that any definition of YYSTYPE or YYLTYPE should
1081 be to a type name that does not contain parentheses or brackets.
1082
1083 * Changes in version 2.2, 2006-05-19:
1084
1085 ** The distribution terms for all Bison-generated parsers now permit
1086 using the parsers in nonfree programs. Previously, this permission
1087 was granted only for Bison-generated LALR(1) parsers in C.
1088
1089 ** %name-prefix changes the namespace name in C++ outputs.
1090
1091 ** The C++ parsers export their token_type.
1092
1093 ** Bison now allows multiple %union declarations, and concatenates
1094 their contents together.
1095
1096 ** New warning: unused values
1097 Right-hand side symbols whose values are not used are reported,
1098 if the symbols have destructors. For instance:
1099
1100 exp: exp "?" exp ":" exp { $1 ? $1 : $3; }
1101 | exp "+" exp
1102 ;
1103
1104 will trigger a warning about $$ and $5 in the first rule, and $3 in
1105 the second ($1 is copied to $$ by the default rule). This example
1106 most likely contains three errors, and could be rewritten as:
1107
1108 exp: exp "?" exp ":" exp
1109 { $$ = $1 ? $3 : $5; free ($1 ? $5 : $3); free ($1); }
1110 | exp "+" exp
1111 { $$ = $1 ? $1 : $3; if ($1) free ($3); }
1112 ;
1113
1114 However, if the original actions were really intended, memory leaks
1115 and all, the warnings can be suppressed by letting Bison believe the
1116 values are used, e.g.:
1117
1118 exp: exp "?" exp ":" exp { $1 ? $1 : $3; (void) ($$, $5); }
1119 | exp "+" exp { $$ = $1; (void) $3; }
1120 ;
1121
1122 If there are mid-rule actions, the warning is issued if no action
1123 uses it. The following triggers no warning: $1 and $3 are used.
1124
1125 exp: exp { push ($1); } '+' exp { push ($3); sum (); };
1126
1127 The warning is intended to help catching lost values and memory leaks.
1128 If a value is ignored, its associated memory typically is not reclaimed.
1129
1130 ** %destructor vs. YYABORT, YYACCEPT, and YYERROR.
1131 Destructors are now called when user code invokes YYABORT, YYACCEPT,
1132 and YYERROR, for all objects on the stack, other than objects
1133 corresponding to the right-hand side of the current rule.
1134
1135 ** %expect, %expect-rr
1136 Incorrect numbers of expected conflicts are now actual errors,
1137 instead of warnings.
1138
1139 ** GLR, YACC parsers.
1140 The %parse-params are available in the destructors (and the
1141 experimental printers) as per the documentation.
1142
1143 ** Bison now warns if it finds a stray "$" or "@" in an action.
1144
1145 ** %require "VERSION"
1146 This specifies that the grammar file depends on features implemented
1147 in Bison version VERSION or higher.
1148
1149 ** lalr1.cc: The token and value types are now class members.
1150 The tokens were defined as free form enums and cpp macros. YYSTYPE
1151 was defined as a free form union. They are now class members:
1152 tokens are enumerations of the "yy::parser::token" struct, and the
1153 semantic values have the "yy::parser::semantic_type" type.
1154
1155 If you do not want or can update to this scheme, the directive
1156 '%define "global_tokens_and_yystype" "1"' triggers the global
1157 definition of tokens and YYSTYPE. This change is suitable both
1158 for previous releases of Bison, and this one.
1159
1160 If you wish to update, then make sure older version of Bison will
1161 fail using '%require "2.2"'.
1162
1163 ** DJGPP support added.
1164 \f
1165 * Changes in version 2.1, 2005-09-16:
1166
1167 ** The C++ lalr1.cc skeleton supports %lex-param.
1168
1169 ** Bison-generated parsers now support the translation of diagnostics like
1170 "syntax error" into languages other than English. The default
1171 language is still English. For details, please see the new
1172 Internationalization section of the Bison manual. Software
1173 distributors should also see the new PACKAGING file. Thanks to
1174 Bruno Haible for this new feature.
1175
1176 ** Wording in the Bison-generated parsers has been changed slightly to
1177 simplify translation. In particular, the message "memory exhausted"
1178 has replaced "parser stack overflow", as the old message was not
1179 always accurate for modern Bison-generated parsers.
1180
1181 ** Destructors are now called when the parser aborts, for all symbols left
1182 behind on the stack. Also, the start symbol is now destroyed after a
1183 successful parse. In both cases, the behavior was formerly inconsistent.
1184
1185 ** When generating verbose diagnostics, Bison-generated parsers no longer
1186 quote the literal strings associated with tokens. For example, for
1187 a syntax error associated with '%token NUM "number"' they might
1188 print 'syntax error, unexpected number' instead of 'syntax error,
1189 unexpected "number"'.
1190 \f
1191 * Changes in version 2.0, 2004-12-25:
1192
1193 ** Possibly-incompatible changes
1194
1195 - Bison-generated parsers no longer default to using the alloca function
1196 (when available) to extend the parser stack, due to widespread
1197 problems in unchecked stack-overflow detection. You can "#define
1198 YYSTACK_USE_ALLOCA 1" to require the use of alloca, but please read
1199 the manual to determine safe values for YYMAXDEPTH in that case.
1200
1201 - Error token location.
1202 During error recovery, the location of the syntax error is updated
1203 to cover the whole sequence covered by the error token: it includes
1204 the shifted symbols thrown away during the first part of the error
1205 recovery, and the lookahead rejected during the second part.
1206
1207 - Semicolon changes:
1208 . Stray semicolons are no longer allowed at the start of a grammar.
1209 . Semicolons are now required after in-grammar declarations.
1210
1211 - Unescaped newlines are no longer allowed in character constants or
1212 string literals. They were never portable, and GCC 3.4.0 has
1213 dropped support for them. Better diagnostics are now generated if
1214 forget a closing quote.
1215
1216 - NUL bytes are no longer allowed in Bison string literals, unfortunately.
1217
1218 ** New features
1219
1220 - GLR grammars now support locations.
1221
1222 - New directive: %initial-action.
1223 This directive allows the user to run arbitrary code (including
1224 initializing @$) from yyparse before parsing starts.
1225
1226 - A new directive "%expect-rr N" specifies the expected number of
1227 reduce/reduce conflicts in GLR parsers.
1228
1229 - %token numbers can now be hexadecimal integers, e.g., "%token FOO 0x12d".
1230 This is a GNU extension.
1231
1232 - The option "--report=lookahead" was changed to "--report=look-ahead".
1233 [However, this was changed back after 2.3.]
1234
1235 - Experimental %destructor support has been added to lalr1.cc.
1236
1237 - New configure option --disable-yacc, to disable installation of the
1238 yacc command and -ly library introduced in 1.875 for POSIX conformance.
1239
1240 ** Bug fixes
1241
1242 - For now, %expect-count violations are now just warnings, not errors.
1243 This is for compatibility with Bison 1.75 and earlier (when there are
1244 reduce/reduce conflicts) and with Bison 1.30 and earlier (when there
1245 are too many or too few shift/reduce conflicts). However, in future
1246 versions of Bison we plan to improve the %expect machinery so that
1247 these violations will become errors again.
1248
1249 - Within Bison itself, numbers (e.g., goto numbers) are no longer
1250 arbitrarily limited to 16-bit counts.
1251
1252 - Semicolons are now allowed before "|" in grammar rules, as POSIX requires.
1253 \f
1254 * Changes in version 1.875, 2003-01-01:
1255
1256 ** The documentation license has been upgraded to version 1.2
1257 of the GNU Free Documentation License.
1258
1259 ** syntax error processing
1260
1261 - In Yacc-style parsers YYLLOC_DEFAULT is now used to compute error
1262 locations too. This fixes bugs in error-location computation.
1263
1264 - %destructor
1265 It is now possible to reclaim the memory associated to symbols
1266 discarded during error recovery. This feature is still experimental.
1267
1268 - %error-verbose
1269 This new directive is preferred over YYERROR_VERBOSE.
1270
1271 - #defining yyerror to steal internal variables is discouraged.
1272 It is not guaranteed to work forever.
1273
1274 ** POSIX conformance
1275
1276 - Semicolons are once again optional at the end of grammar rules.
1277 This reverts to the behavior of Bison 1.33 and earlier, and improves
1278 compatibility with Yacc.
1279
1280 - "parse error" -> "syntax error"
1281 Bison now uniformly uses the term "syntax error"; formerly, the code
1282 and manual sometimes used the term "parse error" instead. POSIX
1283 requires "syntax error" in diagnostics, and it was thought better to
1284 be consistent.
1285
1286 - The documentation now emphasizes that yylex and yyerror must be
1287 declared before use. C99 requires this.
1288
1289 - Bison now parses C99 lexical constructs like UCNs and
1290 backslash-newline within C escape sequences, as POSIX 1003.1-2001 requires.
1291
1292 - File names are properly escaped in C output. E.g., foo\bar.y is
1293 output as "foo\\bar.y".
1294
1295 - Yacc command and library now available
1296 The Bison distribution now installs a "yacc" command, as POSIX requires.
1297 Also, Bison now installs a small library liby.a containing
1298 implementations of Yacc-compatible yyerror and main functions.
1299 This library is normally not useful, but POSIX requires it.
1300
1301 - Type clashes now generate warnings, not errors.
1302
1303 - If the user does not define YYSTYPE as a macro, Bison now declares it
1304 using typedef instead of defining it as a macro.
1305 For consistency, YYLTYPE is also declared instead of defined.
1306
1307 ** Other compatibility issues
1308
1309 - %union directives can now have a tag before the "{", e.g., the
1310 directive "%union foo {...}" now generates the C code
1311 "typedef union foo { ... } YYSTYPE;"; this is for Yacc compatibility.
1312 The default union tag is "YYSTYPE", for compatibility with Solaris 9 Yacc.
1313 For consistency, YYLTYPE's struct tag is now "YYLTYPE" not "yyltype".
1314 This is for compatibility with both Yacc and Bison 1.35.
1315
1316 - ";" is output before the terminating "}" of an action, for
1317 compatibility with Bison 1.35.
1318
1319 - Bison now uses a Yacc-style format for conflict reports, e.g.,
1320 "conflicts: 2 shift/reduce, 1 reduce/reduce".
1321
1322 - "yystype" and "yyltype" are now obsolescent macros instead of being
1323 typedefs or tags; they are no longer documented and are planned to be
1324 withdrawn in a future release.
1325
1326 ** GLR parser notes
1327
1328 - GLR and inline
1329 Users of Bison have to decide how they handle the portability of the
1330 C keyword "inline".
1331
1332 - "parsing stack overflow..." -> "parser stack overflow"
1333 GLR parsers now report "parser stack overflow" as per the Bison manual.
1334
1335 ** %parse-param and %lex-param
1336 The macros YYPARSE_PARAM and YYLEX_PARAM provide a means to pass
1337 additional context to yyparse and yylex. They suffer from several
1338 shortcomings:
1339
1340 - a single argument only can be added,
1341 - their types are weak (void *),
1342 - this context is not passed to ancillary functions such as yyerror,
1343 - only yacc.c parsers support them.
1344
1345 The new %parse-param/%lex-param directives provide a more precise control.
1346 For instance:
1347
1348 %parse-param {int *nastiness}
1349 %lex-param {int *nastiness}
1350 %parse-param {int *randomness}
1351
1352 results in the following signatures:
1353
1354 int yylex (int *nastiness);
1355 int yyparse (int *nastiness, int *randomness);
1356
1357 or, if both %pure-parser and %locations are used:
1358
1359 int yylex (YYSTYPE *lvalp, YYLTYPE *llocp, int *nastiness);
1360 int yyparse (int *nastiness, int *randomness);
1361
1362 ** Bison now warns if it detects conflicting outputs to the same file,
1363 e.g., it generates a warning for "bison -d -o foo.h foo.y" since
1364 that command outputs both code and header to foo.h.
1365
1366 ** #line in output files
1367 - --no-line works properly.
1368
1369 ** Bison can no longer be built by a K&R C compiler; it requires C89 or
1370 later to be built. This change originally took place a few versions
1371 ago, but nobody noticed until we recently asked someone to try
1372 building Bison with a K&R C compiler.
1373 \f
1374 * Changes in version 1.75, 2002-10-14:
1375
1376 ** Bison should now work on 64-bit hosts.
1377
1378 ** Indonesian translation thanks to Tedi Heriyanto.
1379
1380 ** GLR parsers
1381 Fix spurious parse errors.
1382
1383 ** Pure parsers
1384 Some people redefine yyerror to steal yyparse' private variables.
1385 Reenable this trick until an official feature replaces it.
1386
1387 ** Type Clashes
1388 In agreement with POSIX and with other Yaccs, leaving a default
1389 action is valid when $$ is untyped, and $1 typed:
1390
1391 untyped: ... typed;
1392
1393 but the converse remains an error:
1394
1395 typed: ... untyped;
1396
1397 ** Values of mid-rule actions
1398 The following code:
1399
1400 foo: { ... } { $$ = $1; } ...
1401
1402 was incorrectly rejected: $1 is defined in the second mid-rule
1403 action, and is equal to the $$ of the first mid-rule action.
1404 \f
1405 * Changes in version 1.50, 2002-10-04:
1406
1407 ** GLR parsing
1408 The declaration
1409 %glr-parser
1410 causes Bison to produce a Generalized LR (GLR) parser, capable of handling
1411 almost any context-free grammar, ambiguous or not. The new declarations
1412 %dprec and %merge on grammar rules allow parse-time resolution of
1413 ambiguities. Contributed by Paul Hilfinger.
1414
1415 Unfortunately Bison 1.50 does not work properly on 64-bit hosts
1416 like the Alpha, so please stick to 32-bit hosts for now.
1417
1418 ** Output Directory
1419 When not in Yacc compatibility mode, when the output file was not
1420 specified, running "bison foo/bar.y" created "foo/bar.c". It
1421 now creates "bar.c".
1422
1423 ** Undefined token
1424 The undefined token was systematically mapped to 2 which prevented
1425 the use of 2 by the user. This is no longer the case.
1426
1427 ** Unknown token numbers
1428 If yylex returned an out of range value, yyparse could die. This is
1429 no longer the case.
1430
1431 ** Error token
1432 According to POSIX, the error token must be 256.
1433 Bison extends this requirement by making it a preference: *if* the
1434 user specified that one of her tokens is numbered 256, then error
1435 will be mapped onto another number.
1436
1437 ** Verbose error messages
1438 They no longer report "..., expecting error or..." for states where
1439 error recovery is possible.
1440
1441 ** End token
1442 Defaults to "$end" instead of "$".
1443
1444 ** Error recovery now conforms to documentation and to POSIX
1445 When a Bison-generated parser encounters a syntax error, it now pops
1446 the stack until it finds a state that allows shifting the error
1447 token. Formerly, it popped the stack until it found a state that
1448 allowed some non-error action other than a default reduction on the
1449 error token. The new behavior has long been the documented behavior,
1450 and has long been required by POSIX. For more details, please see
1451 Paul Eggert, "Reductions during Bison error handling" (2002-05-20)
1452 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2002-05/msg00038.html>.
1453
1454 ** Traces
1455 Popped tokens and nonterminals are now reported.
1456
1457 ** Larger grammars
1458 Larger grammars are now supported (larger token numbers, larger grammar
1459 size (= sum of the LHS and RHS lengths), larger LALR tables).
1460 Formerly, many of these numbers ran afoul of 16-bit limits;
1461 now these limits are 32 bits on most hosts.
1462
1463 ** Explicit initial rule
1464 Bison used to play hacks with the initial rule, which the user does
1465 not write. It is now explicit, and visible in the reports and
1466 graphs as rule 0.
1467
1468 ** Useless rules
1469 Before, Bison reported the useless rules, but, although not used,
1470 included them in the parsers. They are now actually removed.
1471
1472 ** Useless rules, useless nonterminals
1473 They are now reported, as a warning, with their locations.
1474
1475 ** Rules never reduced
1476 Rules that can never be reduced because of conflicts are now
1477 reported.
1478
1479 ** Incorrect "Token not used"
1480 On a grammar such as
1481
1482 %token useless useful
1483 %%
1484 exp: '0' %prec useful;
1485
1486 where a token was used to set the precedence of the last rule,
1487 bison reported both "useful" and "useless" as useless tokens.
1488
1489 ** Revert the C++ namespace changes introduced in 1.31
1490 as they caused too many portability hassles.
1491
1492 ** Default locations
1493 By an accident of design, the default computation of @$ was
1494 performed after another default computation was performed: @$ = @1.
1495 The latter is now removed: YYLLOC_DEFAULT is fully responsible of
1496 the computation of @$.
1497
1498 ** Token end-of-file
1499 The token end of file may be specified by the user, in which case,
1500 the user symbol is used in the reports, the graphs, and the verbose
1501 error messages instead of "$end", which remains being the default.
1502 For instance
1503 %token MYEOF 0
1504 or
1505 %token MYEOF 0 "end of file"
1506
1507 ** Semantic parser
1508 This old option, which has been broken for ages, is removed.
1509
1510 ** New translations
1511 Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to Alexandre Folle de Menezes.
1512 Croatian, thanks to Denis Lackovic.
1513
1514 ** Incorrect token definitions
1515 When given
1516 %token 'a' "A"
1517 bison used to output
1518 #define 'a' 65
1519
1520 ** Token definitions as enums
1521 Tokens are output both as the traditional #define's, and, provided
1522 the compiler supports ANSI C or is a C++ compiler, as enums.
1523 This lets debuggers display names instead of integers.
1524
1525 ** Reports
1526 In addition to --verbose, bison supports --report=THINGS, which
1527 produces additional information:
1528 - itemset
1529 complete the core item sets with their closure
1530 - lookahead [changed to "look-ahead" in 1.875e through 2.3, but changed back]
1531 explicitly associate lookahead tokens to items
1532 - solved
1533 describe shift/reduce conflicts solving.
1534 Bison used to systematically output this information on top of
1535 the report. Solved conflicts are now attached to their states.
1536
1537 ** Type clashes
1538 Previous versions don't complain when there is a type clash on
1539 the default action if the rule has a mid-rule action, such as in:
1540
1541 %type <foo> bar
1542 %%
1543 bar: '0' {} '0';
1544
1545 This is fixed.
1546
1547 ** GNU M4 is now required when using Bison.
1548 \f
1549 * Changes in version 1.35, 2002-03-25:
1550
1551 ** C Skeleton
1552 Some projects use Bison's C parser with C++ compilers, and define
1553 YYSTYPE as a class. The recent adjustment of C parsers for data
1554 alignment and 64 bit architectures made this impossible.
1555
1556 Because for the time being no real solution for C++ parser
1557 generation exists, kludges were implemented in the parser to
1558 maintain this use. In the future, when Bison has C++ parsers, this
1559 kludge will be disabled.
1560
1561 This kludge also addresses some C++ problems when the stack was
1562 extended.
1563 \f
1564 * Changes in version 1.34, 2002-03-12:
1565
1566 ** File name clashes are detected
1567 $ bison foo.y -d -o foo.x
1568 fatal error: header and parser would both be named "foo.x"
1569
1570 ** A missing ";" at the end of a rule triggers a warning
1571 In accordance with POSIX, and in agreement with other
1572 Yacc implementations, Bison will mandate this semicolon in the near
1573 future. This eases the implementation of a Bison parser of Bison
1574 grammars by making this grammar LALR(1) instead of LR(2). To
1575 facilitate the transition, this release introduces a warning.
1576
1577 ** Revert the C++ namespace changes introduced in 1.31, as they caused too
1578 many portability hassles.
1579
1580 ** DJGPP support added.
1581
1582 ** Fix test suite portability problems.
1583 \f
1584 * Changes in version 1.33, 2002-02-07:
1585
1586 ** Fix C++ issues
1587 Groff could not be compiled for the definition of size_t was lacking
1588 under some conditions.
1589
1590 ** Catch invalid @n
1591 As is done with $n.
1592 \f
1593 * Changes in version 1.32, 2002-01-23:
1594
1595 ** Fix Yacc output file names
1596
1597 ** Portability fixes
1598
1599 ** Italian, Dutch translations
1600 \f
1601 * Changes in version 1.31, 2002-01-14:
1602
1603 ** Many Bug Fixes
1604
1605 ** GNU Gettext and %expect
1606 GNU Gettext asserts 10 s/r conflicts, but there are 7. Now that
1607 Bison dies on incorrect %expectations, we fear there will be
1608 too many bug reports for Gettext, so _for the time being_, %expect
1609 does not trigger an error when the input file is named "plural.y".
1610
1611 ** Use of alloca in parsers
1612 If YYSTACK_USE_ALLOCA is defined to 0, then the parsers will use
1613 malloc exclusively. Since 1.29, but was not NEWS'ed.
1614
1615 alloca is used only when compiled with GCC, to avoid portability
1616 problems as on AIX.
1617
1618 ** yyparse now returns 2 if memory is exhausted; formerly it dumped core.
1619
1620 ** When the generated parser lacks debugging code, YYDEBUG is now 0
1621 (as POSIX requires) instead of being undefined.
1622
1623 ** User Actions
1624 Bison has always permitted actions such as { $$ = $1 }: it adds the
1625 ending semicolon. Now if in Yacc compatibility mode, the semicolon
1626 is no longer output: one has to write { $$ = $1; }.
1627
1628 ** Better C++ compliance
1629 The output parsers try to respect C++ namespaces.
1630 [This turned out to be a failed experiment, and it was reverted later.]
1631
1632 ** Reduced Grammars
1633 Fixed bugs when reporting useless nonterminals.
1634
1635 ** 64 bit hosts
1636 The parsers work properly on 64 bit hosts.
1637
1638 ** Error messages
1639 Some calls to strerror resulted in scrambled or missing error messages.
1640
1641 ** %expect
1642 When the number of shift/reduce conflicts is correct, don't issue
1643 any warning.
1644
1645 ** The verbose report includes the rule line numbers.
1646
1647 ** Rule line numbers are fixed in traces.
1648
1649 ** Swedish translation
1650
1651 ** Parse errors
1652 Verbose parse error messages from the parsers are better looking.
1653 Before: parse error: unexpected `'/'', expecting `"number"' or `'-'' or `'(''
1654 Now: parse error: unexpected '/', expecting "number" or '-' or '('
1655
1656 ** Fixed parser memory leaks.
1657 When the generated parser was using malloc to extend its stacks, the
1658 previous allocations were not freed.
1659
1660 ** Fixed verbose output file.
1661 Some newlines were missing.
1662 Some conflicts in state descriptions were missing.
1663
1664 ** Fixed conflict report.
1665 Option -v was needed to get the result.
1666
1667 ** %expect
1668 Was not used.
1669 Mismatches are errors, not warnings.
1670
1671 ** Fixed incorrect processing of some invalid input.
1672
1673 ** Fixed CPP guards: 9foo.h uses BISON_9FOO_H instead of 9FOO_H.
1674
1675 ** Fixed some typos in the documentation.
1676
1677 ** %token MY_EOF 0 is supported.
1678 Before, MY_EOF was silently renumbered as 257.
1679
1680 ** doc/refcard.tex is updated.
1681
1682 ** %output, %file-prefix, %name-prefix.
1683 New.
1684
1685 ** --output
1686 New, aliasing "--output-file".
1687 \f
1688 * Changes in version 1.30, 2001-10-26:
1689
1690 ** "--defines" and "--graph" have now an optional argument which is the
1691 output file name. "-d" and "-g" do not change; they do not take any
1692 argument.
1693
1694 ** "%source_extension" and "%header_extension" are removed, failed
1695 experiment.
1696
1697 ** Portability fixes.
1698 \f
1699 * Changes in version 1.29, 2001-09-07:
1700
1701 ** The output file does not define const, as this caused problems when used
1702 with common autoconfiguration schemes. If you still use ancient compilers
1703 that lack const, compile with the equivalent of the C compiler option
1704 "-Dconst=". Autoconf's AC_C_CONST macro provides one way to do this.
1705
1706 ** Added "-g" and "--graph".
1707
1708 ** The Bison manual is now distributed under the terms of the GNU FDL.
1709
1710 ** The input and the output files has automatically a similar extension.
1711
1712 ** Russian translation added.
1713
1714 ** NLS support updated; should hopefully be less troublesome.
1715
1716 ** Added the old Bison reference card.
1717
1718 ** Added "--locations" and "%locations".
1719
1720 ** Added "-S" and "--skeleton".
1721
1722 ** "%raw", "-r", "--raw" is disabled.
1723
1724 ** Special characters are escaped when output. This solves the problems
1725 of the #line lines with path names including backslashes.
1726
1727 ** New directives.
1728 "%yacc", "%fixed_output_files", "%defines", "%no_parser", "%verbose",
1729 "%debug", "%source_extension" and "%header_extension".
1730
1731 ** @$
1732 Automatic location tracking.
1733 \f
1734 * Changes in version 1.28, 1999-07-06:
1735
1736 ** Should compile better now with K&R compilers.
1737
1738 ** Added NLS.
1739
1740 ** Fixed a problem with escaping the double quote character.
1741
1742 ** There is now a FAQ.
1743 \f
1744 * Changes in version 1.27:
1745
1746 ** The make rule which prevented bison.simple from being created on
1747 some systems has been fixed.
1748 \f
1749 * Changes in version 1.26:
1750
1751 ** Bison now uses Automake.
1752
1753 ** New mailing lists: <bug-bison@gnu.org> and <help-bison@gnu.org>.
1754
1755 ** Token numbers now start at 257 as previously documented, not 258.
1756
1757 ** Bison honors the TMPDIR environment variable.
1758
1759 ** A couple of buffer overruns have been fixed.
1760
1761 ** Problems when closing files should now be reported.
1762
1763 ** Generated parsers should now work even on operating systems which do
1764 not provide alloca().
1765 \f
1766 * Changes in version 1.25, 1995-10-16:
1767
1768 ** Errors in the input grammar are not fatal; Bison keeps reading
1769 the grammar file, and reports all the errors found in it.
1770
1771 ** Tokens can now be specified as multiple-character strings: for
1772 example, you could use "<=" for a token which looks like <=, instead
1773 of choosing a name like LESSEQ.
1774
1775 ** The %token_table declaration says to write a table of tokens (names
1776 and numbers) into the parser file. The yylex function can use this
1777 table to recognize multiple-character string tokens, or for other
1778 purposes.
1779
1780 ** The %no_lines declaration says not to generate any #line preprocessor
1781 directives in the parser file.
1782
1783 ** The %raw declaration says to use internal Bison token numbers, not
1784 Yacc-compatible token numbers, when token names are defined as macros.
1785
1786 ** The --no-parser option produces the parser tables without including
1787 the parser engine; a project can now use its own parser engine.
1788 The actions go into a separate file called NAME.act, in the form of
1789 a switch statement body.
1790 \f
1791 * Changes in version 1.23:
1792
1793 The user can define YYPARSE_PARAM as the name of an argument to be
1794 passed into yyparse. The argument should have type void *. It should
1795 actually point to an object. Grammar actions can access the variable
1796 by casting it to the proper pointer type.
1797
1798 Line numbers in output file corrected.
1799 \f
1800 * Changes in version 1.22:
1801
1802 --help option added.
1803 \f
1804 * Changes in version 1.20:
1805
1806 Output file does not redefine const for C++.
1807
1808 -----
1809
1810 Copyright (C) 1995-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
1811
1812 This file is part of Bison, the GNU Parser Generator.
1813
1814 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
1815 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
1816 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
1817 (at your option) any later version.
1818
1819 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
1820 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
1821 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
1822 GNU General Public License for more details.
1823
1824 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
1825 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
1826
1827 LocalWords: yacc YYBACKUP glr GCC lalr ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException nullptr
1828 LocalWords: cplusplus liby rpl fprintf mfcalc Wyacc stmt cond expr mk sym lr
1829 LocalWords: IELR ielr Lookahead YYERROR nonassoc LALR's api lookaheads yychar
1830 LocalWords: destructor lookahead YYRHSLOC YYLLOC Rhs ifndef YYFAIL cpp sr rr
1831 LocalWords: preprocessor initializer Wno Wnone Werror FreeBSD prec livelocks
1832 LocalWords: Solaris AIX UX RHEL Tru LHS gcc's Wundef YYENABLE NLS YYLTYPE VCG
1833 LocalWords: yyerror cpp's Wunused yylval yylloc prepend yyparse yylex yypush
1834 LocalWords: Graphviz xml nonterminals midrule destructor's YYSTYPE typedef ly
1835 LocalWords: CHR chr printf stdout namespace preprocessing enum pre include's
1836 LocalWords: YYRECOVERING nonfree destructors YYABORT YYACCEPT params enums de
1837 LocalWords: struct yystype DJGPP lex param Haible NUM alloca YYSTACK NUL goto
1838 LocalWords: YYMAXDEPTH Unescaped UCNs YYLTYPE's yyltype typedefs inline Yaccs
1839 LocalWords: Heriyanto Reenable dprec Hilfinger Eggert MYEOF Folle Menezes EOF
1840 LocalWords: Lackovic define's itemset Groff Gettext malloc NEWS'ed YYDEBUG YY
1841 LocalWords: namespaces strerror const autoconfiguration Dconst Autoconf's FDL
1842 LocalWords: Automake TMPDIR LESSEQ ylwrap endif yydebug YYTOKEN YYLSP ival hh
1843 LocalWords: extern YYTOKENTYPE TOKENTYPE yytokentype tokentype STYPE lval pdf
1844 LocalWords: lang yyoutput dvi html ps POSIX lvalp llocp
1845
1846 Local Variables:
1847 mode: outline
1848 fill-column: 76
1849 End: