Re: YACCaty YACC - Parsing YACC with YACC

There is a grammar for Yacc++ (which includes its lexer, which is in a
yacc-like rather than lex-like notation) included with Yacc++. It is
the same grammar we use to build the tool itself, stripped of the
semantic actions. Being able to compile Yacc++ with itself was an
explicit requirement we had from the beginning.


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Personal diatribe warning:


Without a hack, one cannot write a plain yacc grammar in yacc, because
the semicolon at the end of a rule is optional, one needs to look for
identifier : to find the start of a new rule (end of the current one).
this means that the grammar for yacc is LALR(2) and not LALR(1).
Thus, there are yacc grammars in yacc, but they require this lexical
trick to work.


The notation for lex is also hard to parse, but mostly because of
issues at the lexical level. This is because of the prevalent
tendency of the Unix/C community of the time to like 1-character
tokens with \ escapes. Most of the shell and make tools are similarly
hard to deal with neatly lexically. The general regular expression
syntax in Emacs or Perl is also likewise obfuscated, with slight
variations that can make them subtly incompatible.


However, it is worth noting that the issues with dealing with the
lexical issues is balanced by the terseness of the notation and the
fact that one can often read them with a C program that looks only at
1 character at a time.


It is just a personal foible that I prefer a language that is highly
consistent to one which is terse. The other tends to lead to ad hack
processing fraught with special cases that are never fully
generalized.


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Final note, if you want a copy of Yacc++ for personal [non-commercial]
use, send me an email explaining what you want to do with it. I "give
away" to individuals a free version with the limitation that any
software built with it must be GPLed.


Hope this helps,
-Chris


******************************************************************************
Chris Clark email: christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com
Compiler Resources, Inc. Web Site: http://world.std.com/~compres
23 Bailey Rd voice: (508) 435-5016
Berlin, MA 01503 USA twitter: @intel_chris

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