Bison compatible with yacc/byacc/<whatever>yacc?

[James Buchanan]

I have never experienced problems with bison before, although I have never
written anything substantial with flex and bison.

I keep getting odd error messages from bison. "Invalid input" and something
about no colon after rule, etc. I've never had these error messages before.
Incidentally there are colons after declaring a rule. It spits out about a
zillion lines of errors.

Is there a limit on what can match a rule, for example:

statement:        blah blah
                    { some C code }
                | foo bar baz
                { some C code }
                | fooby bar baz
                { some C code }
                | ... and for about 30 different ways to make a "statement"
                ;

Is it that I have so many ways to make a "statement?"

I wonder why the O'Reilly book says I can feed bison my yacc grammars when
bison clearly doesn't like them? Has bison changed substantially since then
so that it is no longer compatible with yacc?

James