Re: [PATCH] Re: FYI: The pleasures of the wonderful ;

[Joel E. Denny]

On Sat, 8 Nov 2008, Di-an JAN wrote:

> I wrote a patch to solve this by adding the semicolon only if needed.

I'm against this.  I still agree with Akim's NEWS entry on branch-2.4.1, 
which says that our plan is to rid ourselves of this feature not to make 
it more robust and then be forced to maintain the extra code.  I think the 
2.3 behavior will be fine for 2.4.1 in the case of yacc.c.  I'm in support 
of removing it altogether for 2.5.

Of course, the feature is now deactivated for newer languages.  I'd be 
surprised if anyone complained about that, but maybe the NEWS entry should 
be reworded to reflect that change.

> (Am I suppose to Cc: to bison-patches?)

I try to, but I frequently forget.  Maybe that's because I've never seen 
the point of having both a bug-bison and a bison-patches, but I figure 
it's not worthwhile to try to change the culture.

> By the way, to support languages that doesn't use semicolons, just
> make the added semicolon a M4 macro that defaults to `;' and other
> skeletons can define it to empty.

I don't see a need to give skeletons the choice.  After my recent patch, 
the feature is only active when yacc.c is selected as a default.

> While writing the testcase, I noticed that Bison doesn't allow unescaped
> newlines in string literals in user code.  I think this should be up to
> the compiler that actually interpretes the code.  That's the first patch.

I do not think this change should be made for 2.4.1, which is just a patch 
release.  I'll let someone else figure out whether it should be in 2.5.