Re: My plans for Bison: history

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Eric,

This is a fantastic piece of doc!  Thanks for the effort!

> Le 14 févr. 2019 à 02:51, Eric S. Raymond <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> Patch incorporating your suggestions enclosed.

Could you please submit it as a patch proposal (with git show to
get the commit header).

Also:

- begame => became

- the sources old versions of Unix => the sources of old...

- we tend to use reentrant rather than re-entrant.  In fact,
  a few hyphens have been removed in the last years (e.g.,
  lookahead instead of look-ahead).

- "Robert Corbett actually wrote two LALR parsers in 1985"
  I think this is an overstatement (over-statement?  ;-).
  I have wandered in the sources of Bison for a long time now, but
  when I look at byacc, I feel at home: I clearly recognize the sources.
  I think the differences between the initial versions of byacc and
  bison must have been very narrow...

- "The main difference between Yacc and Byson/Bison is that
  Bison supports the @@N construction (giving access to"
  That should be "was": today there are many more differences.
  You list some of them after, but there are more than this.
  For instance, %define opens a host of configuration options.

FTR, I have been lucky enough to have met Mike Lesk --- I was an
intern a few meter away from his office.  And also Stu Feldman.
Aho was the boss then, but I never met him :(

Cheers!