java bison_bison

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++ or Java

programming in order to use Bison.

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

specific compilers.

Installation

Build from git

Here are basic installation instructions for a repository checkout:

$ git submodule update --init

$ ./bootstrap

then proceed with the usual configure && make steps.

The file README-hacking.md is about building, modifying and checking Bison.

Build from tarball

See the 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 before configuring Bison. It

is available from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/, for instance

https://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gettext/libtextstyle-0.20.5.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.

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

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/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 [e-mail].

Bug reports

Please send bug reports to [e-mail]. 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.