Re: Bibtex reference for bison?

[Hans Aberg]

At 12:17 +0200 2002/06/04, Akim Demaille wrote:
>Andrew> I assume we shouldn't be crediting Corbett anymore?
>
>If the question is whether there is still straight copies of lines he
>wrote, I couldn't answer, but I'd suspect there are very few.
>
>Nonetheless, he created the beast, and is the one who chose many of
>the algorithms etc.  So of course we ought to credit him!

I think that in science, one should credit people for what the actually do,
if it is significant enough to be worth mentioning. The reason is not only
to honor the person who did it, but to make it easier for those that wants
to follow the line of development.

So I think that Corbett should be credited for originating Bison.

Many ask what his "semantic parser" is; so I think one might add a comment
something like:
  Bison was originally written by Robert Paul Corbett [in year 198.] as a
part of his thesis work at Berkeley [reference], with the intent of
developing semantic based error recovery. One of his conclusions, and that
of others at Berkeley, was that this so called "semantic parser" was not
worth the effort. This "semantic parser" part has since [in year 2002] been
removed from Bison.
  Bison was then taken over by GNU...
  Bison was subsequently made Yacc compatible mainly by ...

  Hans Aberg