Re: Yacc shift/reduce conflicts

      I think this grammar is at less LALR(1) if you have only one terminal
in someterminal. But it should become LALR(k) if you have at most k
terminals in someterminal.
      I think that rules (1) and (3) may create ambiguity according their
derivation. The following form would be better, I guess:


statements:
statement
| statements semicolon statement
;


statement:
/* empty */
| someterminal
;


Martyn Weiss wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm updating a language grammar I wrote a while ago using MKS Yacc,
> which consists of one or more statements separated by semicolons, i.e.
> S1;S2;...SN
> .
>
> One of the things I want to do is to allow for superfluous embedded
> and trailing semicolons, as in S1;;S2;
>
> I had a bit if trouble expressing this in rules without getting
> shift/reduce conflicts. I found that if I simplify the grammar down
> to the following:
>
> program:
> statements
> ;
> statements:
> statement
> | statements semicolon
> | statements semicolon statement
> ;
> statement:
> someterminal
> ;
>
> yacc reports no conflicts, but it looks a bit clumsy to me. However,
> if I replace "someterminal" by "expression", which has a number of
> alternative definitions (simpleexpression, term, factor, etc) I
> immediately get a whole raft of shift/reduce conflicts, which leads me
> to think the simplified version above isn't the best way to express
> the "superfluous semicolons" point mentioned above.
>
> Can anyone suggest a better formulation of "statements" or explain how
> I go about getting rid of the s/r conflicts in the fuller version.

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