Re: incorrect yychar for unambiguous GLR

[Paul Eggert]

"Joel E. Denny" <address@hidden> writes:

> Also, the documentation likes to hyphenate `look-ahead'.  Should it be 
> yylookAheadNeeds (capital 'A')?  Is Paul Eggert the authority on this 
> issue?

Naah, I just used my spelling checker, which didn't have "lookahead".

I just now checked Google Scholar.  It reports about 1,240 hits for
"parser look-ahead" (#1 is the Bison manual itself; #2 is DeRemer) and
1,450 for "parser lookahead" (#1 is Parr & Quong).  (Maybe the LR guys
prefer a hyphen?:-)

Clearly either spelling is acceptable.  It would make sense to
standardize on one.  Personally I find myself in the (slight)
majority, and prefer "lookahead" without the hyphen, but I'm too lazy
to change everything myself.

> I believe gcc likes the extra parentheses when you have an assignment used 
> as a boolean expression.

Yes, but if 'p' is a simple variable normally it's easier to read this:

     p = E;
     if (p)
       S;

than this:

    if ((p = E))
      S;

The situation is a bit different with 'while' loops, but for 'if' it's
no contest.

> I believe the push to satisfy lint started with a user request.

Yes.  The original request was from Nicolas Joly of the Institut
Pasteur, who's using Bison-generated parsers to detect and parse
biological sequence formats.  See
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bison/2005-10/msg00000.html>.