Re: bison'd files don't compile under Microsoft VC++

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:47:39 +0100
> From: Hans Aberg <address@hidden>
> 
> On the one hand there is the historical question who wrote the Bison parser
> C dynamic stack; I thought it was Akim, but he says it was not.

I believe it was originally Robert Corbett, though I think Richard
Stallman was responsible for making it conform to standards (e.g. in
the matter of name spaces).

> So the failure does not have anything to do with the code as such, because
> it could be easily made working,

It depends on what you mean by "easily".  We have been trying this
approach for a couple of months and it's still not working.  I
initially approved of this approach because I thought it was a simple,
portable change, but I am not a C++ expert and it's clear that I was
mistaken.

If we had a lot of programmers who were willing to test this approach
on a lot of different compilers, then I suppose it might be done
"easily".  But I am skeptical that either your patch, or dgluss's
patch (which merely fixes the problem for certain Microsoft
platforms), will be widely portable; whereas the patch that I've
proposed will basically revert to the way Bison used to do things, and
this has apparently worked for many years, so I have more confidence
in its portability.