Re: prologue alternatives

[Paul Eggert]

"Joel E. Denny" <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't mean to say that people can use one without understanding the 
> other.  I just think Bison can sometimes help alleviate some of the 
> limitations in C (or whatever) in order to improve the maintainability of 
> parser specifications.

Ah, OK, then we're in pretty close agreement.

> In this case, the user might wish not to use %defines.  However, some of 
> the skeletons require %defines.  In order to get the declaration order 
> right in that required header file, it might be necessary to have:
>
>   %defines "my_parser.h" {
>     $var{stype-code}
>     $var{YYSTYPE}
>   }
>
> to tell Bison that "my_parser.h" is the header file it requires.

Sorry, I don't quite follow.  Would the above be syntactic sugar for this?

  %{ #include "my_parser.h" %}
  %file "my_parser.h" {
    $var{stype-code}
    $var{YYSTYPE}
  }

If not, then what is the difference?  It sounds like you're thinking
%defines should put something extra into my_parser.h, but if that's an
issue can't we give that extra thing a name and let it be another
$var{tokens} or something like that?