On 06/14/2012 04:55 PM, Fabricio Pellegrini wrote:
Hello,
I'm working in a project that long time ago decided to use Bison++ to create
its parser, mainly because at that time Bison didn't support C++ code.
So today, besides the fact that Bison++ is quite old and seems that no one
is supporting it anymore.
What would be the benefits to migrate from it to Bison?
Does Bison have a solid support for C++ today that justifies the migration?
First, it looks like you want to migrate from old bison to the newer
bison++.
If that is so, it means you want to generate a bison C++ parser, instead
of a bison C parser. This means your question is about whether or not to
migrate from C to C++. It is not necessarily a topic for a bison
discussion group, but it might still be considered somewhat related.
I am not a bison guy, but I think C++ has many more features and
flexibility than plain old C (you can searh the internet for a list). I
think this is a very good reason to migrate.
Still, some people claim C++ is slow compared to C. You should know
this may be true only because of programmer's careless. As a more
flexible language, C++ also makes it easier for the programmer to write
slow code, and that is all about it.
Unfortunately as you can see sometimes that reflects badly on the
language. C++ is not in itself slow, but on the contrary: sometime
compilers generate faster code from C++ sources than from equivalent C
sources.
Unlike in flex, the bison C++ interface is not marked as experimental,
so you should be safe with it, but you should know that GLR parsers
currently need the C interface from the old bison. These are parsers for
languages that are sometimes ambiguous, meaning the same line of code
could possible mean two different statements, depending on the following
lines of code.
Have fun,
Timothy Madden
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