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Re: My plans for Bison: history


From: Eric S. Raymond
Subject: Re: My plans for Bison: history
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2019 09:49:00 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.10.1 (2018-07-13)

Akim Demaille <address@hidden>:
> +Use of byacc spread rapidly due to its public domain license. However, once
> +Bison became available, byacc itself passed out of general use.
> 
> Do you have evidence about this?

Mostly that I've read the source code for an awful lot of projects over the
last thirty years and byacc use is vanishingly rare in that sample. I
think I saw it used *once*.  By comparison, while Bison use is not common
exactly it's easily in the dozens in my sample

I asked on #debian and found a way to check. It seems that you can say
this:

address@hidden:~/WWW/writings/unfinished/lawbook$ apt-cache rdepends byacc
byacc
Reverse Depends:
  freebsd-glue
    byacc:i386
 |kimwitu++
    byacc:i386
 |kimwitu
    byacc:i386

So in the entire Debian package database there is exactly one byacc dependent.
Which you can see from the following I don't have installed, so it's queryiing
all packages.

address@hidden:~/WWW/writings/unfinished/lawbook$ aptitude show kimwitu
Package: kimwitu                         
Version: 4.6.1-7.2
State: not installed
Priority: optional
Section: universe/devel
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <address@hidden>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 1,163 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Recommends: c-compiler, kimwitu-doc
Suggests: bison | byacc | btyacc
Conflicts: kimwitu:i386
Description: Compiler development tool, complementary to lex and yacc
 Kimwitu (pronounced kee'mweetoo) is a system that supports the construction of 
programs
 that use trees or terms as their main data structure. It is a ‘meta-tool’ in 
the
 development process of tools. 
 
 It can easily be interfaced with Yacc and Lex – the idea is that yacc and lex 
are used to
 do the parsing, and Kimwitu routines are used to built and manipulate the 
parse tree. 
 
 There is also Kimwitu++ (also packaged for Debian) which interfaces with C++ 
instead of C.

Note that kimwitu also works with yacc and bison.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.





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