Bison News
----------
-* Changes in version 2.5 (????-??-??):
+* Changes in version 2.5.1 (????-??-??):
-** Named References Support
+** Future changes:
+
+ The next major release will drop support for K&R C.
+
+** yacc.c: YYBACKUP works as expected.
+
+** glr.c improvements:
+
+*** Location support is eliminated when not requested:
+
+ GLR parsers used to include location-related code even when
+ locations were not requested, and therefore not even usable.
+
+*** __attribute__ is preserved:
+
+ __attribute__ is no longer disabled when __STRICT_ANSI__ is defined
+ (i.e., when -std is passed to GCC).
+
+** lalr1.java: several fixes:
+
+ The Java parser no longer throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if
+ the first token leads to a syntax error. Some minor clean ups.
+
+** C++11 compatibility:
+
+ C and C++ parsers use nullptr instead of 0 when __cplusplus is
+ 201103L or higher.
+
+** C++ locations:
+
+ The position and location constructors (and their initialize
+ methods) accept new arguments for line and column. Several issues
+ in the documentation were fixed.
+
+** liby is no longer asking for "rpl_fprintf" on some platforms.
+
+** Changes in the manual:
+
+*** %printer is documented
+
+ The %printer directive, supported since at least Bison 1.50, is
+ finally documented. The %mfcalc example is extended to demonstrate
+ its use of printer.
+
+ The C++ parsers now also support yyoutput (as an alias to
+ debug_stream ()) for consistency with the C skeletons.
+
+*** Several improvements have been made:
+
+ The layout for grammar excerpts was changed to a more compact
+ scheme. Named references are motivated. The description of the
+ automaton description file (*.output) is updated to the current
+ format. Incorrect index entries were fixed. Some other errors were
+ fixed.
+
+** Changes to the build system:
+
+*** Warnings during the build procedure have been eliminated.
+
+*** Several portability problems in the test suite have been fixed:
+
+ This includes warnings with some compilers, unexpected behavior of
+ tools such as diff, warning messages from the test suite itself,
+ etc.
+
+*** The install-pdf target work properly:
+
+ Running "make install-pdf" (or -dvi, -html, -info, and -ps) no
+ longer halts in the middle of its course.
+
+* Changes in version 2.5 (2011-05-14):
+
+** Grammar symbol names can now contain non-initial dashes:
+
+ Consistently with directives (such as %error-verbose) and with
+ %define variables (e.g. push-pull), grammar symbol names may contain
+ dashes in any position except the beginning. This is a GNU
+ extension over POSIX Yacc. Thus, use of this extension is reported
+ by -Wyacc and rejected in Yacc mode (--yacc).
+
+** Named references:
Historically, Yacc and Bison have supported positional references
($n, $$) to allow access to symbol values from inside of semantic
When no ambiguity is possible, original symbol names may be used
as named references:
- if_stmt : 'if' cond_expr 'then' then_stmt ';'
+ if_stmt : "if" cond_expr "then" then_stmt ';'
{ $if_stmt = mk_if_stmt($cond_expr, $then_stmt); }
In the more common case, explicit names may be declared:
- stmt[res] : 'if' expr[cond] 'then' stmt[then] 'else' stmt[else] ';'
+ stmt[res] : "if" expr[cond] "then" stmt[then] "else" stmt[else] ';'
{ $res = mk_if_stmt($cond, $then, $else); }
Location information is also accessible using @name syntax. When
These features are experimental in this version. More user feedback
will help to stabilize them.
-** IELR(1) and Canonical LR(1) Support
+** IELR(1) and canonical LR(1):
IELR(1) is a minimal LR(1) parser table generation algorithm. That
is, given any context-free grammar, IELR(1) generates parser tables
- with the full language recognition power of canonical LR(1) but with
- nearly the same number of parser states as LALR(1). This reduction in
- parser states is often an order of magnitude. More importantly,
+ with the full language-recognition power of canonical LR(1) but with
+ nearly the same number of parser states as LALR(1). This reduction
+ in parser states is often an order of magnitude. More importantly,
because canonical LR(1)'s extra parser states may contain duplicate
conflicts in the case of non-LR(1) grammars, the number of conflicts
for IELR(1) is often an order of magnitude less as well. This can
%define lr.type ielr
%define lr.type canonical-lr
- The default reduction optimization in the parser tables can also be
- adjusted using `%define lr.default-reductions'. See the documentation
- for `%define lr.type' and `%define lr.default-reductions' in the
- section `Bison Declaration Summary' in the Bison manual for the
- details.
+ The default-reduction optimization in the parser tables can also be
+ adjusted using `%define lr.default-reductions'. For details on both
+ of these features, see the new section `Tuning LR' in the Bison
+ manual.
These features are experimental. More user feedback will help to
stabilize them.
-** Unrecognized %code qualifiers are now an error not a warning.
+** LAC (Lookahead Correction) for syntax error handling:
-** %define improvements.
+ 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 can 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 the
+ obsolete `#define YYERROR_VERBOSE'), the expected token list in the
+ syntax error message can both contain invalid tokens and omit valid
+ tokens.
-*** Unrecognized variables are now an error not a warning.
+ 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.
-*** Multiple invocations for any variable is now an error not a warning.
+ LAC is a new mechanism within the parsing algorithm that solves
+ these problems for canonical LR, IELR, and LALR without sacrificing
+ %nonassoc, default reductions, or state merging. When LAC is in
+ use, canonical LR and IELR behave almost 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.
-*** Can now be invoked via the command line.
+ Currently, LAC is only supported for deterministic parsers in C.
+ You can enable LAC with the following directive:
+
+ %define parse.lac full
+
+ See the new section `LAC' in the Bison manual for additional
+ details including a few caveats.
+
+ LAC is an experimental feature. More user feedback will help to
+ stabilize it.
+
+** %define improvements:
+
+*** Can now be invoked via the command line:
Each of these command-line options
except that the manner in which Bison processes multiple definitions
for the same NAME differs. Most importantly, -F and --force-define
quietly override %define, but -D and --define do not. For further
- details, see the section "Bison Options" in the Bison manual.
+ details, see the section `Bison Options' in the Bison manual.
-*** Variables renamed.
+*** Variables renamed:
The following %define variables
The old names are now deprecated but will be maintained indefinitely
for backward compatibility.
-*** Values no longer need to be quoted in grammar file.
+*** Values no longer need to be quoted in the grammar file:
If a %define value is an identifier, it no longer needs to be placed
within quotations marks. For example,
%define api.push-pull push
-** Symbol names.
+*** Unrecognized variables are now errors not warnings.
- Consistently with directives (such as %error-verbose) and variables
- (e.g. push-pull), symbol names may include dashes in any position,
- similarly to periods and underscores. This is GNU extension over
- POSIX Yacc whose use is reported by -Wyacc, and rejected in Yacc
- mode (--yacc).
+*** Multiple invocations for any variable is now an error not a warning.
-** Temporary hack for adding a semicolon to the user action.
+** Unrecognized %code qualifiers are now errors not warnings.
+
+** Character literals not of length one:
+
+ Previously, Bison quietly converted all character literals to length
+ one. For example, without warning, Bison interpreted the operators in
+ the following grammar to be the same token:
+
+ exp: exp '++'
+ | exp '+' exp
+ ;
+
+ Bison now warns when a character literal is not of length one. In
+ some future release, Bison will start reporting an error instead.
+
+** Destructor calls fixed for lookaheads altered in semantic actions:
+
+ Previously for deterministic parsers in C, if a user semantic action
+ altered yychar, the parser in some cases used the old yychar value to
+ determine which destructor to call for the lookahead upon a syntax
+ error or upon parser return. This bug has been fixed.
+
+** C++ parsers use YYRHSLOC:
+
+ Similarly to the C parsers, the C++ parsers now define the YYRHSLOC
+ macro and use it in the default YYLLOC_DEFAULT. You are encouraged
+ to use it. If, for instance, your location structure has `first'
+ and `last' members, instead of
+
+ # define YYLLOC_DEFAULT(Current, Rhs, N) \
+ do \
+ if (N) \
+ { \
+ (Current).first = (Rhs)[1].location.first; \
+ (Current).last = (Rhs)[N].location.last; \
+ } \
+ else \
+ { \
+ (Current).first = (Current).last = (Rhs)[0].location.last; \
+ } \
+ while (false)
+
+ use:
+
+ # define YYLLOC_DEFAULT(Current, Rhs, N) \
+ do \
+ if (N) \
+ { \
+ (Current).first = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, 1).first; \
+ (Current).last = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, N).last; \
+ } \
+ else \
+ { \
+ (Current).first = (Current).last = YYRHSLOC (Rhs, 0).last; \
+ } \
+ while (false)
+
+** YYLLOC_DEFAULT in C++:
+
+ The default implementation of YYLLOC_DEFAULT used to be issued in
+ the header file. It is now output in the implementation file, after
+ the user %code sections so that its #ifndef guard does not try to
+ override the user's YYLLOC_DEFAULT if provided.
+
+** YYFAIL now produces warnings and Java parsers no longer implement it:
+
+ YYFAIL has existed for many years as an undocumented feature of
+ deterministic parsers in C generated by Bison. More recently, it was
+ a documented feature of Bison's experimental Java parsers. As
+ promised in Bison 2.4.2's NEWS entry, any appearance of YYFAIL in a
+ semantic action now produces a deprecation warning, and Java parsers
+ no longer implement YYFAIL at all. For further details, including a
+ discussion of how to suppress C preprocessor warnings about YYFAIL
+ being unused, see the Bison 2.4.2 NEWS entry.
+
+** Temporary hack for adding a semicolon to the user action:
Previously, Bison appended a semicolon to every user action for
reductions when the output language defaulted to C (specifically, when
about a missing semicolon where it did not before. Future releases of
Bison will cease to append semicolons entirely.
-** Character literals not of length one.
+** Verbose syntax error message fixes:
- Previously, Bison quietly converted all character literals to length
- one. For example, without warning, Bison interpreted the operators in
- the following grammar to be the same token:
+ When %error-verbose or the obsolete `#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 more complete fix requires LAC, described above:
- exp: exp '++'
- | exp '+' exp
- ;
+*** 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.
- Bison now warns when a character literal is not of length one. In
- some future release, Bison will report an error instead.
+*** 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.
+
+** Java skeleton fixes:
+
+*** A location handling bug has been fixed.
+
+*** The top element of each of the value stack and location stack is now
+ cleared when popped so that it can be garbage collected.
+
+*** Parser traces now print the top element of the stack.
+
+** -W/--warnings fixes:
+
+*** Bison now properly recognizes the `no-' versions of categories:
+
+ For example, given the following command line, Bison now enables all
+ warnings except warnings for incompatibilities with POSIX Yacc:
+
+ bison -Wall,no-yacc gram.y
+
+*** Bison now treats S/R and R/R conflicts like other warnings:
+
+ Previously, conflict reports were independent of Bison's normal
+ warning system. Now, Bison recognizes the warning categories
+ `conflicts-sr' and `conflicts-rr'. This change has important
+ consequences for the -W and --warnings command-line options. For
+ example:
+
+ bison -Wno-conflicts-sr gram.y # S/R conflicts not reported
+ bison -Wno-conflicts-rr gram.y # R/R conflicts not reported
+ bison -Wnone gram.y # no conflicts are reported
+ bison -Werror gram.y # any conflict is an error
+
+ However, as before, if the %expect or %expect-rr directive is
+ specified, an unexpected number of conflicts is an error, and an
+ expected number of conflicts is not reported, so -W and --warning
+ then have no effect on the conflict report.
+
+*** The `none' category no longer disables a preceding `error':
+
+ For example, for the following command line, Bison now reports
+ errors instead of warnings for incompatibilities with POSIX Yacc:
-** Verbose error messages fixed for nonassociative tokens.
+ bison -Werror,none,yacc gram.y
- 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.
+*** The `none' category now disables all Bison warnings:
-* Changes in version 2.4.2 (????-??-??):
+ Previously, the `none' category disabled only Bison warnings for
+ which there existed a specific -W/--warning category. However,
+ given the following command line, Bison is now guaranteed to
+ suppress all warnings:
+
+ bison -Wnone gram.y
+
+** Precedence directives can now assign token number 0:
+
+ Since Bison 2.3b, which restored the ability of precedence
+ directives to assign token numbers, doing so for token number 0 has
+ produced an assertion failure. For example:
+
+ %left END 0
+
+ This bug has been fixed.
+
+* 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.
+
+** Failures in the test suite for GCC 4.5 have been fixed.
+
+** Failures in the test suite for some versions of Sun Studio C++ have
+ been fixed.
+
+** Contrary to Bison 2.4.2's NEWS entry, it has been decided that
+ warnings about undefined %prec identifiers will not be converted to
+ 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
+ in the test suite on some versions of at least Solaris, AIX, HP-UX,
+ RHEL4, and Tru64 have been addressed. As a result, fatal Bison
+ errors should no longer cause M4 to report a broken pipe on the
+ affected platforms.
+
+** `%prec IDENTIFIER' requires IDENTIFIER to be defined separately.
+
+ POSIX specifies that an error be reported for any identifier that does
+ not appear on the LHS of a grammar rule and that is not defined by
+ %token, %left, %right, or %nonassoc. Bison 2.3b and later lost this
+ error report for the case when an identifier appears only after a
+ %prec directive. It is now restored. However, for backward
+ compatibility with recent Bison releases, it is only a warning for
+ now. In Bison 2.5 and later, it will return to being an error.
+ [Between the 2.4.2 and 2.4.3 releases, it was decided that this
+ warning will not be converted to an error in Bison 2.5.]
** Detection of GNU M4 1.4.6 or newer during configure is improved.
** The output file does not define const, as this caused problems when used
with common autoconfiguration schemes. If you still use ancient compilers
that lack const, compile with the equivalent of the C compiler option
- `-Dconst='. autoconf's AC_C_CONST macro provides one way to do this.
+ `-Dconst='. Autoconf's AC_C_CONST macro provides one way to do this.
** Added `-g' and `--graph'.
\f
* Changes in version 1.26:
-** Bison now uses automake.
+** Bison now uses Automake.
** New mailing lists: <bug-bison@gnu.org> and <help-bison@gnu.org>.
** Tokens can now be specified as multiple-character strings: for
example, you could use "<=" for a token which looks like <=, instead
-of chosing a name like LESSEQ.
+of choosing a name like LESSEQ.
** The %token_table declaration says to write a table of tokens (names
and numbers) into the parser file. The yylex function can use this
Output file does not redefine const for C++.
-Local Variables:
-mode: outline
-End:
-
-----
-Copyright (C) 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
-2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+Copyright (C) 1995-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This file is part of Bison, the GNU Parser Generator.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+ LocalWords: yacc YYBACKUP glr GCC lalr ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException nullptr
+ LocalWords: cplusplus liby rpl fprintf mfcalc Wyacc stmt cond expr mk sym lr
+ LocalWords: IELR ielr Lookahead YYERROR nonassoc LALR's api lookaheads yychar
+ LocalWords: destructor lookahead YYRHSLOC YYLLOC Rhs ifndef YYFAIL cpp sr rr
+ LocalWords: preprocessor initializer Wno Wnone Werror FreeBSD prec livelocks
+ LocalWords: Solaris AIX UX RHEL Tru LHS gcc's Wundef YYENABLE NLS YYLTYPE VCG
+ LocalWords: yyerror cpp's Wunused yylval yylloc prepend yyparse yylex yypush
+ LocalWords: Graphviz xml nonterminals midrule destructor's YYSTYPE typedef ly
+ LocalWords: CHR chr printf stdout namespace preprocessing enum pre include's
+ LocalWords: YYRECOVERING nonfree destructors YYABORT YYACCEPT params enums de
+ LocalWords: struct yystype DJGPP lex param Haible NUM alloca YYSTACK NUL goto
+ LocalWords: YYMAXDEPTH Unescaped UCNs YYLTYPE's yyltype typedefs inline Yaccs
+ LocalWords: Heriyanto Reenable dprec Hilfinger Eggert MYEOF Folle Menezes EOF
+ LocalWords: Lackovic define's itemset Groff Gettext malloc NEWS'ed YYDEBUG
+ LocalWords: namespaces strerror const autoconfiguration Dconst Autoconf's FDL
+ LocalWords: Automake TMPDIR LESSEQ
+
+Local Variables:
+mode: outline
+End:
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