Re: hint infrastructure setup (v3)

Fabien COELHO wrote:

>>The last time I studied this stuff (which was quite a while back) the
>>follow set was something an LR parser generator would have to compute
>>anyway.
>>
>>
>
>Yes.
>
>
>
>
>>I don't know whether bison's internal tables expose that set in any
>>useful fashion, but it surely seems worth a look.
>>
>>
>
>Having a look is something I can do;-)
>
>I'm afraid it looks like "internal state 1232, 43425 and 42523", but there
>may be some support enough in the generated code to get something more
>interesting. It would require to be able to get textual meta informations
>out of the state number, which is possible if bison/flex people did
>something about it.
>
>

You *really* don't want to go there. If you want to see what the parser
is doing you can run "bison -r all" over the grammar and examine the
.output file. But please, let's not examine the internal states. Talk
about unmaintainability! Also, I suspect that bison does a good bit of
optimisation by way of combining states that removes some of the
information you might need, but I haven't looked into it closely.

If we really wanted to go down this route, a predictive (i.e. LL(n)
type) parser rather than a bottom up parser would probably be more
suitable, but I doubt anyone has any stomach for doing that work, even
if there was agreement on the need for it.

cheers

andrew