Re: Bison 1.875 won't build on Tru64 4.0 Unix

[Paul Eggert]

Tony Leneis <address@hidden> writes:

> Why does something with as simple a build environment as bison require some
> special feature that's apparently mainly available in GNU M4?

Bison uses M4 as an extension language to expand its templates.  This
used to be done all in C code, but that didn't conveniently expand to
supporting multiple parser languages and multiple parsing algorithms.

The templating method is still under construction, though, and we'll
keep your comments in mind as we work on it further.

It's perhaps not much consolation to you, but Bison isn't the only
program that requires GNU M4; Autoconf does as well.