These features are experimental. More user feedback will help to
stabilize them.
+** LAC (lookahead correction) for syntax error handling:
+
+ Canonical LR, IELR, and LALR can suffer from a couple of problems
+ upon encountering a syntax error. First, the parser might perform
+ additional parser stack reductions before discovering the syntax
+ error. Such reductions perform user semantic actions that are
+ unexpected because they are based on an invalid token, and they
+ cause error recovery to begin in a different syntactic context than
+ the one in which the invalid token was encountered. Second, when
+ verbose error messages are enabled (with %error-verbose or `#define
+ YYERROR_VERBOSE'), the expected token list in the syntax error
+ message can both contain invalid tokens and omit valid tokens.
+
+ The culprits for the above problems are %nonassoc, default
+ reductions in inconsistent states, and parser state merging. Thus,
+ IELR and LALR suffer the most. Canonical LR can suffer only if
+ %nonassoc is used or if default reductions are enabled for
+ inconsistent states.
+
+ LAC is a new mechanism within the parsing algorithm that completely
+ solves these problems for canonical LR, IELR, and LALR without
+ sacrificing %nonassoc, default reductions, or state mering. When
+ LAC is in use, canonical LR and IELR behave exactly the same for
+ both syntactically acceptable and syntactically unacceptable input.
+ While LALR still does not support the full language-recognition
+ power of canonical LR and IELR, LAC at least enables LALR's syntax
+ error handling to correctly reflect LALR's language-recognition
+ power.
+
+ Currently, LAC is only supported for deterministic parsers in C.
+ You can enable LAC with the following directive:
+
+ %define parse.lac full
+
+ See the documentation for `%define parse.lac' in the section `Bison
+ Declaration Summary' in the Bison manual for additional details.
+
+ LAC is an experimental feature. More user feedback will help to
+ stabilize it.
+
** Unrecognized %code qualifiers are now an error not a warning.
** %define improvements.
Bison now warns when a character literal is not of length one. In
some future release, Bison will report an error instead.
-** Verbose error messages fixed for nonassociative tokens.
-
- When %error-verbose is specified, syntax error messages produced by
- the generated parser include the unexpected token as well as a list of
- expected tokens. Previously, this list erroneously included tokens
- that would actually induce a syntax error because conflicts for them
- were resolved with %nonassoc. Such tokens are now properly omitted
- from the list.
+** Verbose syntax error message fixes:
+
+ When %error-verbose or `#define YYERROR_VERBOSE' is specified,
+ syntax error messages produced by the generated parser include the
+ unexpected token as well as a list of expected tokens. The effect
+ of %nonassoc on these verbose messages has been corrected in two
+ ways, but a complete fix requires LAC, described above:
+
+*** When %nonassoc is used, there can exist parser states that accept no
+ tokens, and so the parser does not always require a lookahead token
+ in order to detect a syntax error. Because no unexpected token or
+ expected tokens can then be reported, the verbose syntax error
+ message described above is suppressed, and the parser instead
+ reports the simpler message, "syntax error". Previously, this
+ suppression was sometimes erroneously triggered by %nonassoc when a
+ lookahead was actually required. Now verbose messages are
+ suppressed only when all previous lookaheads have already been
+ shifted or discarded.
+
+*** Previously, the list of expected tokens erroneously included tokens
+ that would actually induce a syntax error because conflicts for them
+ were resolved with %nonassoc in the current parser state. Such
+ tokens are now properly omitted from the list.
+
+*** Expected token lists are still often wrong due to state merging
+ (from LALR or IELR) and default reductions, which can both add
+ invalid tokens and subtract valid tokens. Canonical LR almost
+ completely fixes this problem by eliminating state merging and
+ default reductions. However, there is one minor problem left even
+ when using canonical LR and even after the fixes above. That is,
+ if the resolution of a conflict with %nonassoc appears in a later
+ parser state than the one at which some syntax error is
+ discovered, the conflicted token is still erroneously included in
+ the expected token list. Bison's new LAC implementation,
+ described above, eliminates this problem and the need for
+ canonical LR. However, LAC is still experimental and is disabled
+ by default.
** Destructor calls fixed for lookaheads altered in semantic actions.
the user %code sections so that its #ifndef guard does not try to
override the user's YYLLOC_DEFAULT if provided.
-* Changes in version 2.4.3 (????-??-??):
+* Changes in version 2.4.3 (2010-08-05):
+
+** Bison now obeys -Werror and --warnings=error for warnings about
+ grammar rules that are useless in the parser due to conflicts.
** Problems with spawning M4 on at least FreeBSD 8 and FreeBSD 9 have
been fixed.
errors in Bison 2.5. They will remain warnings, which should be
sufficient for POSIX while avoiding backward compatibility issues.
+** Minor documentation fixes.
+
* Changes in version 2.4.2 (2010-03-20):
** Some portability problems that resulted in failures and livelocks
-----
-Copyright (C) 1995-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (C) 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
+2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation,
+Inc.
This file is part of Bison, the GNU Parser Generator.