Re: Interactive parsing with Bison

[Hans Aberg]

On 29 Jun 2006, at 19:57, Richard Stallman wrote:

> > I do not understand what "dependencies" refers to in the context of
> > Bison.  Are we talking about the same thing?
>
>     Oh, sorry, it should have been "file dependencies", i.e., how the
>     file modification dates relate among files calling each other.  
> When
>     using 'make', these file dependencies are written down  
> explicitly by
>     giving the filesystem location of the files in the 'make' file,  
> and
>     'make' then checks the file modification dates, and if a dependent
>     file has been modified, the associated action (like a compile) is
>     initiated.
>
> I know how Make works, but what I don't see is how it is relevant to
> the issue at hand.  We're talking about a development interface for
> Bison grammars.  Why are you bringing all this stuff which relates to
> Make?

Satya initially detailed how he thought the development work should  
proceed, so:

>     Now, the IDE's typically allows one to not having to write down  
> these
>     file dependencies explicitly, but merely indicating the source  
> file.
>     The IDE will then scan the source file for constructs such as
>     '#include <filename>", identifying the file with file name
>     'filename', adding it to the list of file dependencies of the  
> source
>     file, and also doing this recursively in the included file.
>
> It seems like you are proposing an IDE for Makefiles.  That might be
> useful, but shouldn't you discuss it with the Make maintainers,
> instead of the Bison maintainers?

And in this context, you are right: I think that if the proper  
development work is put at the appropriate place, the work for doing  
this GUI support of Bison will be relatively limited. On the other  
hand, if it is not done that way, doing the things that Satya has in  
mind for only Bison directly will involve too much work.

  Hans Aberg