beta testing

[Philippe Bekaert]

Hi,

No, this is not a question how to generate parsers imbedded in a C++
class. After carefully studying the bison manual, I found out that there
is no direct way to do so, but I also found out that it requires only
small changes to the bison.simple code fragment that bison copies into
the parser. The changes I did are:

- work around the definition of the YYSTYPE union in the generated
parser code (because I need to include the y.tab.h file in the C++ class
declaration as a part of the interface to flex. Without changing
anything, this results in duplicate declaration of the YYSTYPE union). I
did this by redefining YYSTYPE to something else in the C++ code on top
of my bison script. On top of bison.simple, YYSTYPE needs to be
undefined again.

- global declaration of yychar, yylval, yylloc and yynerrs and the
forward declaration of yyparse() need to be omitted in bison.simple. I
did this by introducing a new preprocessor symbol YY_OMIT_DECLS. If this
symbol is defined, these
declarations are omitted. 

All the rest can be done without changing bison. (Write me back if you'd
like to know more details what I did.)

In order to install this tweaked version of bison, I downloaded the
latest release of bison and ... found this FAQ.

! Q4.  Will Bison ever have C++ support?
!
! A4.  Yes, it's in the works.  I will need beta testers, however (and
!     people haven't exactly been lining up for the task).  When this
!     feature is ready to be tested, it will be announced on the
!     bug-bison mailing list.  If you're interested in testing C++
!     support when it becomes available, please consider subscribing to
!     the list, especially if you are willing to beta test other
!     releases as well.      
Please include me on the list. I have access to a couple of SGI machines
here (besides Solaris and Linux) and can do some beta testing for you.

! Q6.  How do I join the help-bison and bug-bison mailing lists?
!
! A6.  See http://www.gnu.org/ (the section about "GNU mailing lists")
!    for more information.
There is no "GNU mailing lists" item on the www.gnu.org page ...

Philippe.

-- 
Philippe Bekaert
Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik
Im Stadtwald, Geb. 46.1
66123 Saarbruecken - Germany
+49 681 9325422 (office phone)
+49 681 9325499 (office fax)
+49 179 4503121 (private phone)