Re: proposed patch for Bison core dumps when using lalr1.cc

[Akim Demaille]

Tim Van Holder said:

>>  Paul> Admittedly the simple cases are not as popular these days.
>>  Paul> Still, they are in use, and the longstanding tradition
>> is to write a
>>  Paul> header file only if -d is specified.
>>
>>  Paul> It would be confusing for users if C and C++ behaved
>>  Paul> differently here.
>>
>> I don't think so.  Generating C without headers belongs to the past.
>> Except for yacc.c, I believe all the other skeletons can generate
>> mandatory headers.
>
> I disagree - there's something icky about a tool generating files
> I didn't request - if I tell bison to make me a grammar in foo.cc
> from foo.yy I do not expect to get 3 header files generated for me
> as well - especially if that list of additional files is not stable
> across bison versions (and I suspect that will be the case, especially
> for skeletons that evolve).

That *is* an interesting concept "files I didn't request".  By definition,
the files created by the tool you used were _requested_.

I agree that newly created file can be a problem but the C++ parser is
still not documented, so it has more freedom than the others.  Actually,
I'm surprised to learn tht you use it.  Could you provide more feedback
about it?

> At the very least bison should provide an option (--clean?) that cleans
> up after itself properly.

Why not, indeed.  That sounds good to me.