Bison, memory leaking

There is a problem with bison. When bison tries to fix a parse error
then it discards semantic values on the valuestack and it discards
tokens that it gets from yylex(), until it reaches a state that it can
reduce in.


The problem is that if you have dynamicly allocated data in the
semantic value. Then it is lost. And we have a memory leak. And very
often you have some dynamic data there. (A tree, a linked list, C++
objects with destructors, or ...).


I have pretty much solved the problem by adding some stuff to the
parser. basicly a function-call that is called when the parser
discards a semantic value. (I call it yydiscard). Here the
parser(writer) can examine which symbol is discarded and
deallocate the semantic value.


I can however not use bison as it is. I need a little different output.
I need the yystos table and some defines of the nonterminal and terminal
symbols (the internal numbers, called NTxxx and Txxx in bison).
But bison only emits these if you have a %semantic_parser.


I can fix it myself just for me (already done that). But I think that
more people then I should be interesting in this.


And why isn't there anything done in this area before?


And where can I get in touch with the person who works with bison.


/Dennis (md3den@mdstud.chalmers.se)
[This is a well-known yacc problem. I usually solve it by chaining the
malloc'ed data together and then releasing it all either at the end of
the parse or in the top-level statement-list type rule. -John]
--

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