Re: Fwd: Are Google summer of code 2006 ideas still available?

[Joel E. Denny]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Akim Demaille wrote:

> - first, design a true AST for Bison
>   something to represent the grammar we read.  We have more or less
>   something like this in Bison, but much work is done on it, it's not
>   "faithful" to the entry, it's already heavily modified.
> 
>   Once this AST done, then be ready to process it for real, applying
>   all the transformations we want (elimination of useless things,
>   elimination of symbolic names, elimination of mid-rule actions, fuse
>   the %unions, run semantic checks etc.).

I've often wished that Bison's syntactic and semantic analysis phases were 
more fully separated.  However, this sounds like a major rewrite of vital 
Bison internals.  If someone tackles this over the summer, I hope we can 
find a way to maintain a stable version of Bison in parallel.

> I wish Bison was in C++...  Joel, WDYT?  This kind of changes would
> really benefit from moving to some simple, standard, portable, C++.
> Yeah, I know Paul, there's no such thing as portability, just sweat :)

With a strong emphasis on *simple* C++, I agree.  I don't want to scare 
away developers by employing hardcore generic programming, multiple 
inheritance, etc.  I imagine a "C++ Don'ts" section evolving in HACKING.

I'm not strong with portability issues, so I'll rely on others to figure 
that part out.