Re: why are locations dictated by bison?

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "John" == John W Millaway <address@hidden> writes:

>> My point is John M. aintainer believes he knows better than me what
>> I need.

John> Listen, tool developers have to assume SOMETHING about what the
John> users want, and the users have to take that into consideration
John> when evaluating ANY 3rd party tool, library, or codebase. 

I agree!  In the general case _something_ can be done.  E.g., bison
can do something about locations.  But there are places where you
cannot provide a canned solution.  Locations in Flex is one such
thing.  What the user needs is a means to do it, and a documentation
on how to do it.


John> I can't stress that enough: The flex user wants a canned
John> scanner. They want to adjust it, tweak it, control it, modify
John> it, override it -- But they still want flex to write code for
John> them. There is no other purpose to flex.

I agree.  I'm happy to see Flex is maintained again, and I hope it
will help me in some of my tasks, or even make new things possible.
But really, I tried, I repeat *I started all this locations fuss*, and
I really wanted to have Flex help me.

It turns out on this point it can't.


John> You will always be able to construct a scenario in which your
John> needs are better served by custom code, than by flex-generated
John> code. I can't change that by posting some magic sample ".l"
John> file.

Again, agreed.  If you want to provide a canned solution for location
tracking, you need something higher-level, means to specify what are
blanks etc.  It turns out that this is an impossible task, and you
have to equip your actions.  Also, you can't expect to have yylloc
used for location tracking (just as Flex knows nothing about yylval,
and having Flex know about yylloc would be very bad).


Finally, you provide a low level service, and to this end, Flex
already provides everything that is needed.

John> To the flex user who voices complaints about small features,
John> such as location tracking, I say: I hear you. I'm on it. I'll do
John> my best. 

Please, before trying to implement anything, just try to write what
the user is expected to type.  You'll see you have a problem somewhere.