Re: Reductions during Bison error handling

[Paul Hilfinger]

HA> Yes, but I was under the impression that that was a part of the LALR
HA> algorithm, see Aho et al, p. 240: "However, when presented with an
HA> erroneous input, the LALR parser may proceed to do some reduction after the
HA> LR parser has declared an error..."

Ah.  "Extra reductions" is not part of LALR per se, but rather a SIDE
EFFECT of its lossy table compression scheme---specifically its
merging of lookahead states.  The more prominent side effect is that
there are cases where LALR cannot resolve a reduction, but LR can
(granted, these latter are cases that do not seem to materialize in
practice, hence the popularity of LALR).  Extra reductions are ALSO a
side-effect of Bison's conflation of error cases with most-frequent
reductions.  Alas, I really have no idea how many fewer cases of extra
reductions would occur if we used LR(1) with Bison's table compression
vs. LALR(1) with Bison's table compression.

Paul Hilfinger