bison-2.5.1_rc2 released [beta]

[Akim Demaille]

The Bison team is very happy to announce the forthcoming release
of Bison 2.5.1, which addresses quite a few issues from Bison 2.5.

Here are the compressed sources:
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.5.1_rc2.tar.gz   (2.7MB)
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.5.1_rc2.tar.xz   (1.5MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.5.1_rc2.tar.gz.sig
 ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.5.1_rc2.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
 http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

 gpg --verify bison-2.5.1_rc2.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

 gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 78D5264E

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
 Autoconf 2.69
 Automake 1.12
 Flex 2.5.35
 Gettext 0.18.1
 Gnulib v0.0-7415-g338dd5d

NEWS

* Changes in version 2.5.1_rc2 (2012-05-23):

** Future changes:

 The next major release will drop support for generating parsers in K&R C.

** yacc.c: YYBACKUP works as expected.

** glr.c improvements:

*** Location support is eliminated when not requested:

 GLR parsers used to include location-related code even when locations were
 not requested, and therefore not even usable.

*** __attribute__ is preserved:

 __attribute__ is no longer disabled when __STRICT_ANSI__ is defined (i.e.,
 when -std is passed to GCC).

** lalr1.java: several fixes:

 The Java parser no longer throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the
 first token leads to a syntax error.  Some minor clean ups.

** Changes for C++:

*** C++11 compatibility:

 C and C++ parsers use "nullptr" instead of "0" when __cplusplus is 201103L
 or higher.

*** Header guards

 The header files such as "parser.hh", "location.hh", etc. used a constant
 name for preprocessor guards, for instance:

 #ifndef BISON_LOCATION_HH
 # define BISON_LOCATION_HH
 ...
 #endif // !BISON_LOCATION_HH

 The inclusion guard is now computed from "PREFIX/FILE-NAME", where lower
 case characters are converted to upper case, and series of
 non-alphanumerical characters are converted to an underscore.

 With "bison -o lang++/parser.cc", "location.hh" would now include:

 #ifndef YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH
 # define YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH
 ...
 #endif // !YY_LANG_LOCATION_HH

*** C++ locations:

 The position and location constructors (and their initialize methods)
 accept new arguments for line and column.  Several issues in the
 documentation were fixed.

** liby is no longer asking for "rpl_fprintf" on some platforms.

** Changes in the manual:

*** %printer is documented

 The "%printer" directive, supported since at least Bison 1.50, is finally
 documented.  The "mfcalc" example is extended to demonstrate it.

 For consistency with the C skeletons, the C++ parsers now also support
 "yyoutput" (as an alias to "debug_stream ()").

*** Several improvements have been made:

 The layout for grammar excerpts was changed to a more compact scheme.
 Named references are motivated.  The description of the automaton
 description file (*.output) is updated to the current format.  Incorrect
 index entries were fixed.  Some other errors were fixed.

** Building bison:

*** Conflicting prototypes with recent/modified Flex.

 Fixed build problems with the current, unreleased, version of Flex, and
 some modified versions of 2.5.35, which have modified function prototypes.

*** Warnings during the build procedure have been eliminated.

*** Several portability problems in the test suite have been fixed:

 This includes warnings with some compilers, unexpected behavior of tools
 such as diff, warning messages from the test suite itself, etc.

*** The install-pdf target work properly:

 Running "make install-pdf" (or -dvi, -html, -info, and -ps) no longer
 halts in the middle of its course.