Re: CEDET merge question

[David Engster]

Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:
> The Semantic parser appears to have two major "back-ends", bovine and
> wisent, which are used to generate Semantic tags.  Does anyone know how
> crucial these packages are, and whether one or the other (or both) be
> dropped or somehow trimmed down?

I think it depends on the question if people should be able to edit and
compile the grammars itself, only using Emacs proper.

The bovine/wisent parsers and major-modes are crucial for development,
but I think they are not necessarily needed for the resulting parser; I
may be wrong though, especially when it comes to the Wisent parser,
which I'm not familiar with at all.

For example, the file semantic/bovine/c.by is the Bison grammar for
C/C++ parsing. During CEDET's make process, the 'bovine' code generates
the file semantic/bovine/semantic-c-by.el, which is the resulting C(++)
lexer in Emacs Lisp. This file is then required by
semantic-c.el. Therefore, I would think that including the resulting
semantic-c-by.el should be enough for the C parser to be working.

As mentioned above, there are also the major-modes for bison/wisent in
CEDET (bovine-grammar.el, wisent-grammar.el) which are needed for
writing and debugging the grammar files. I think those would also not
necessarily be needed in Emacs. However, if people would like to extend
or fix grammar files (or write new ones), they would then have to get
CEDET from CVS.

> (Wisent, for instance, appears to be an entire Elisp reimplementation
> of Bison...)

Yes, it is exactly that. :-)

Regards,
David