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 "Efficient Construction of LALR(1) Lookahead Sets" by F. DeRemer
 
  24 and A. Pennello, in ACM TOPLS Vol 4 No 4, October 1982.  Their
 
  25 technique is the standard one now.)
 
  28         free software foundation