Re: Interactive parsing with Bison

[Satya]

> The second would be a "cleaned" and "modern" version of Bison. It could
> feature a rename(where deemed useful) of all keywords to provide a
> consistent
> interface, consistent error/warning handling, drop all legacy code,
> consistent/practical extension mechanisms, use modern language features,
> and
> so on. It would require users to do source changes in order to use
> Bison "3.0", but I think they would be few and I also think many would be
> willing to do it.
>
> In that way Bison would be able to develop in an unlimited way(and a way
> attractive to developers), while the "old school" would still be there for
> those who prefers that.



well, I did start out to play with that idea --   'Visual Bison' - its a
Bison that sports a GUI and also has 'modern' features like a builtin
scanner (lexer) generator, and interactive parsing; (and yeah, many more
ideas like XML floating around here.. why not..)

That was my first alternative when I said 'take the current release of Bison
and build a GUI front end to it'; Very soon I realized that this tool would
be left out as Bison evolves; just cant keep up with all the changes in
Bison; so I decided to discuss it on the list first; If I can put some
debugging interface into Bison, I can still build Visual Bison on top of
that;

whats more, as the discussions progressed, it also struck to me that it
would not very convinient for developers if this were to be a standalone
tool; to integrate well with development, it could be a plugin into Emacs or
Eclpise; thats what it is coming to as of now;

I realize the scope of changes suggested by your mail is much bigger than
what i am talking about, but I am just sharing my point of view about how
this modern Bison should be like;

Thanks
Satya.