Re: Interactive parsing with Bison

[Paul Eggert]

Satya <address@hidden> writes:

> Of course Java has definitely better (in fact excellent) support for
> all these and more (as demonstrated by SableCC - an LALR parser
> generator written in Java). But it would be incredibly slow

But Bison itself is already "incredibly slow", due to its M4 component.
It's hard to imagine a Java-based implementation being slower.

Anyway, low-level efficiency in the parser generator is no longer of
practical importance.  Any mainstream language ought to be fast enough
to execute Bison itself.

Bison-generated parsers are another matter, of course; here we must
continue to support at least C and C++, for backward-compatibility
reasons.  If we were to switch implementation languages (and I still
think this unlikely), we'd switch only from the C+M4 used to implement
Bison itself, not from the C and C++ code that Bison generates.