Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/akimd/bison

GNU Bison
https://github.com/akimd/bison

bison gnu parser-generator yacc

Last synced: 1 day ago
JSON representation

GNU Bison

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
GNU Bison is a general-purpose parser generator that converts an annotated

context-free grammar into a deterministic LR or generalized LR (GLR) parser

employing LALR(1) parser tables.  Bison can also generate IELR(1) or

canonical LR(1) parser tables.  Once you are proficient with Bison, you can

use it to develop a wide range of language parsers, from those used in

simple desk calculators to complex programming languages.



Bison is upward compatible with Yacc: all properly-written Yacc grammars

work with Bison with no change.  Anyone familiar with Yacc should be able to

use Bison with little trouble.  You need to be fluent in C, C++, D or Java

programming in order to use Bison.



Bison and the parsers it generates are portable, they do not require any

specific compilers.



GNU Bison's home page is https://gnu.org/software/bison/.



# Installation

## Build from git

The [README-hacking.md file](README-hacking.md) is about building, modifying

and checking Bison.  See its "Working from the Repository" section to build

Bison from the git repo.  Roughly, run:



    $ git submodule update --init

    $ ./bootstrap



then proceed with the usual `configure && make` steps.



## Build from tarball

See the [INSTALL file](INSTALL) for generic compilation and installation

instructions.



Bison requires GNU m4 1.4.6 or later.  See

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.6.tar.gz.



## Running a non installed bison

Once you ran `make`, you might want to toy with this fresh bison before

installing it.  In that case, do not use `src/bison`: it would use the

*installed* files (skeletons, etc.), not the local ones.  Use `tests/bison`.



## Colored diagnostics

As an experimental feature, diagnostics are now colored, controlled by the

`--color` and `--style` options.



To use them, install the libtextstyle library, 0.20.5 or newer, before

configuring Bison.  It is available from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/,

for instance https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/libtextstyle-0.20.5.tar.gz,

or as part of Gettext 0.21 or newer, for instance

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.21.tar.gz.



The option --color supports the following arguments:

- always, yes: Enable colors.

- never, no: Disable colors.

- auto, tty (default): Enable colors if the output device is a tty.



To customize the styles, create a CSS file, say `bison-bw.css`, similar to



    /* bison-bw.css */

    .warning   { }

    .error     { font-weight: 800; text-decoration: underline; }

    .note      { }



then invoke bison with `--style=bison-bw.css`, or set the `BISON_STYLE`

environment variable to `bison-bw.css`.



In some diagnostics, bison uses libtextstyle to emit special escapes to

generate clickable hyperlinks.  The environment variable

`NO_TERM_HYPERLINKS` can be used to suppress them.  This may be useful for

terminal emulators which produce garbage output when they receive the escape

sequence for a hyperlink. Currently (as of 2020), this affects some versions

of emacs, guake, konsole, lxterminal, rxvt, yakuake.



## Relocatability

If you pass `--enable-relocatable` to `configure`, Bison is relocatable.



A relocatable program can be moved or copied to a different location on the

file system.  It can also be used through mount points for network sharing.

It is possible to make symlinks to the installed and moved programs, and

invoke them through the symlink.



See "Enabling Relocatability" in the documentation.



## Internationalization

Bison supports two catalogs: one for Bison itself (i.e., for the

maintainer-side parser generation), and one for the generated parsers (i.e.,

for the user-side parser execution).  The requirements between both differ:

bison needs ngettext, the generated parsers do not.  To simplify the build

system, neither are installed if ngettext is not supported, even if

generated parsers could have been localized.  See

https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-bison/2009-08/msg00006.html for more

details.



# Questions

See the section FAQ in the documentation (doc/bison.info) for frequently

asked questions.  The documentation is also available in PDF and HTML,

provided you have a recent version of Texinfo installed: run `make pdf` or

`make html`.



If you have questions about using Bison and the documentation does not

answer them, please send mail to .



# Bug reports

Please send bug reports to .  Be sure to include the

version number from `bison --version`, and a complete, self-contained test

case in each bug report.



# Copyright statements

For any copyright year range specified as YYYY-ZZZZ in this package, note

that the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.