Re: [updated PATCH] %language declaration

[Joel E. Denny]

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> Joel E. Denny wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > 
> > > Seriously, though, this business about "experimental" is kind of
> > > demoralizing for users who are reading the manual.  Why should they
> > > invest their work in an "experimental" feature?
> > 
> > The C++ skeletons and %destructor seemed to do okay this way, but I don't
> > know the full history there.
> 
> Yes, but I also think that we should not exaggerate.

Exaggerate what?  That they did okay?  Or the instability of our current 
directives?

> Personally, I would not label as experimental even the requires/provides part
> (though I do find it a bit unnerving that we need %code-top...), as well as
> %language.

If I had to choose only one new feature to label as experimental, it's the 
prologue alternatives because they keep evolving.  After my recent 
discussion with Hans Aberg and Jeff Inman, I have yet another revision for 
them.  (I'm thinking it'll ease all the concerns I've heard so far... 
including the dislike for %code-top that even I feel.  However, I'm 
putting that off until the other current issues settle down.)

Anyway, I just don't see the harm in labeling things experimental in a 
test release.  And I believe we do need at least one test release before 
the next stable release.

> If it wasn't for the language conventions, I would have kept the ".tab" even
> in the Java output, as I don't like to depart too much from the traditional
> Bison behavior.

My feeling is that the community has already departed... look at Bison's 
own parse-gram.c and parse-gram.h.