Re: What are the benefits to migrate from Bison++ to Bison

[Timothy Madden]

On 06/14/2012 04:55 PM, Fabricio Pellegrini wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm working in a project that long time ago decided to use Bison++ to create
> its parser, mainly because at that time Bison didn't support C++ code.
> So today, besides the fact that Bison++ is quite old and seems that no one
> is supporting it anymore.
>
> What would be the benefits to migrate from it to Bison?
> Does Bison have a solid support for C++ today that justifies the migration?

First, it looks like you want to migrate from old bison to the newer 
bison++.

If that is so, it means you want to generate a bison C++ parser, instead 
of a bison C parser. This means your question is about whether or not to 
migrate from C to C++. It is not necessarily a topic for a bison 
discussion group, but it might still be considered somewhat related.

I am not a bison guy, but I think C++ has many more features and 
flexibility than plain old C (you can searh the internet for a list). I 
think this is a very good reason to migrate.

Still, some people claim C++ is slow compared to C. You should know 
this may be true only because of programmer's careless. As a more 
flexible language, C++ also makes it easier for the programmer to write 
slow code, and that is all about it.

Unfortunately as you can see sometimes that reflects badly on the 
language. C++ is not in itself slow, but on the contrary: sometime 
compilers generate faster code from C++ sources than from equivalent C 
sources.

Unlike in flex, the bison C++ interface is not marked as experimental, 
so you should be safe with it, but you should know that GLR parsers 
currently need the C interface from the old bison. These are parsers for 
languages that are sometimes ambiguous, meaning the same line of code 
could possible mean two different statements, depending on the following 
lines of code.


Have fun,
Timothy Madden