Re: Misc. minor bison 1.33 bugs and annoyances patched

[Akim Demaille]

| Hello,

Hi!  Thanks for the patch.  But one first problem is that we take
single task patches, yours addresses different issues.  Also, did you
sign the papers for the FSF and specifically Bison?

| The attached patch fixes the following minor bugs and
| (some not-so-minor) annoyances in bison 1.33 (some of
| which also afflicted earlier versions):
| 
| 1. use of ugly and error-prone pointer casts is no longer
|    required with YYPURE if YYPARSE_PARAM_PTR_TYPE
|    is defined (see revised documentation for details).

I very much agree with your intention here, but there are other major
changes in Bison, and first of all, I want them to be finished before
starting any other deep change.  You will certainly argue that your
patch is not profound, but it is: it is part of things that must be
carefully thought in conjunction with multiple language output etc.

I plan to move to a Bison parser for the .y files, which might render
these obscure CPP macros completely obsolete.


| 2. explanation of yydebug for "--akim".

I understood this bit since, and I'm still shocked it works!  I find
this incredibly ugly!  I'll adjust the comment, thanks for the impetus.

| 3. avoided compiler diagnostics for bison.simple regarding
|    possible loss of information due to integral type
|    promotion.

The idea is OK, but then, please work on the CVS version of Bison, as
1.33 is basically dead (only maintenance).

| 4. avoided "constant conditional" compiler diagnostics for
|    bison.simple due to useless do - while (0) in macros.

This is on purpose.

| 5. proper prototype declaration for __STDC__ as well as
|    for __cplusplus.

This is interesting.  I would apply it to CVS Bison.