Error reporting with YACC (or Bison)

(This is pretty heady newsgroup, so I'm almost embarrassed to post this
question here. If there is a more appropriate group for this type of
question, please let me know. OK, onto the question...)


I used Flex and Bison to write an interpreter for a simple c-like
language. When Bison encounters a syntax error it spits out "parse
error". I want to give more descriptive error messages, such
as "expecting semicolon after line 3". How would I go about this?


The best I can think of so far is to create productions in my grammar
for every bogus syntax I can think of, and generate errors when they
are recognized.


Is there a better way using these tools?


Thanks!
Eric
[Not really. Yacc doesn't give you much help at error recovery. People
have tried to do better error reports over the years, see the comp.compilers
archives. -John]

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