Re: bison-2.5 released [stable]

[Hans Aberg]

On 15 May 2011, at 03:29, Joel E. Denny wrote:

> Bison version 2.5 is now available.  Relative to 2.4.3, this version
> contains many bug fixes and many exciting new features that need more
> user feedback.

It compiles on Mac OS X 10.6.7, Xcode Version 3.2.6 64-bit, 
i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1 (GCC) 4.2.1 which is a GCC derived compiler. (On 
this platform, there is a later clang/llvm based compiler, too, that comes with 
Xcode 4.)

I think there was a problem with 'make install-pdf' - I had to go to the 
directory doc/ to get it work. (Somehow, I got it installed, but I do not 
remember exactly how.)

>  Some of the most notable features are:
> 
>  1. Support for dashes in grammar symbol names.
>  2. Named references, such as $sym instead of $1, in semantic actions.

I tried these. The latter is nice when developing a grammar - so easy to forget 
changing the numbers.

In the Bison manual, sec. 3.5.6, "Using Named References", the @ location 
variables are used without reference before they are defined in the next 
section. So perhaps some link there.

The first line of this section might say that named references may be more 
convenient, as they are more descriptive and avoid the renumbering problem.

Hans