Re: Reductions during Bison error handling

[Mike Castle]

In article <address@hidden>,
Richard Stallman  <address@hidden> wrote:
>                                                      Given how difficult
>    LALR(1) parser internal behavior is to understand, I find it a little
>    unlikely that there can be any significant reliance on the obscure
>    places where current behavior differs from that documented.
>
>This sort of thing happens all the time with undocumented features in
>(say) Windows.  People use trial and error and get something that works.
>We certainly must not assume nobody depends on this merely because
>it isn't documented.

There appears to already be precedence* in the GNU Software suite where
undocumented features were removed and existing (prominent) software that
depended on that feature failed.  I would hate to see inconsistency on
the importance of maintaining compatibility amongst the GNU Projects.

mrc

* The precedence in this case is a change in how mktime() works with glibc
and how it affects PostgreSQL.  See
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2002-05/msg00355.php for more
details.

-- 
     Mike Castle      address@hidden      www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different"); -- gcc