Bison and LR(1) Parsers

[Tim_Josling]

Hello,

I am having troubles with the limitations of LALR(1) which bison implements. (I
have read the section in the manual on mysterious conflicts, also read the
dragon book etc).

The main problem is that to avoid the LALR(1) problems I have to explode out a
lot of the constructs rather than making it modular. This is making my grammar a
lot larger and more troublesome to maintain. The parser is for cobol (
http://www.gnu.org/software/cobol/cobol.html).

Having an LR(1) parser would solve this problem for me. The state table is a lot
larger but with modern CPUs this need not be a show stopper - provided it is an
option not mandatory.

My question to you as the maintainer of bison is would you in principle accept
patches that would

- not change default behaviour
- add an option to produce an LR(1) parser
- provide all needed documentation updates to reflefct the code changes
- conform to the FSF coding standards and not mess up the code

I have an FSF copyright assignment in place already.

Tim Josling