Re: and! Bison vs yacc Re: Flex vs Lex

Alfred Perlstein <bright(at)wintelcom(dot)net> writes:
> Basically the configure script ought to abort if bison isn't found,

Certainly not, seeing as how the standard distribution doesn't require
the recipient to run bison at all. It's only an issue if you are
working from CVS sources. Even then, there are vendor yaccs that will
work (possibly after some YFLAGS-tuning), and it is not configure's
charter to prevent you from using them. I am not sure there are any
non-flex lexes that will work, though.

The nasty part of this is that some OSes seem to have flex or bison
installed only under the name 'lex' or 'yacc'. Probably what configure
should do is
1. Search for flex; if found, use it.
2. Search for lex; if found, test to see if it's really flex
(eg, by checking "lex --version" output).
and likewise for bison (except go ahead and try to use yacc even
if it's not bison).

regards, tom lane