Ruby 1.9 needs bison?

[gabriele renzi @ google]

Hi gurus and nubys,
I just spotted this in the changelog:
* parse.y: make ruby parser reentrant. merge ripper parser to the
real one. this change makes ruby require bison.

first, thank you for merging ripper.
Alternative interpreter/editor/tool writers out there should realy
appreciate this, I think

But there are two things that I don't understand:
First, what are the implications of having a reentrant parser ?
I mean, this was the only thing that was non reentrant, so this cange
applies to ruby as a whole or was this just a change to make ripper
happy?

Second, what does it meen that now ruby requires bison? I used to
think that bison could generate standalone parsers, do we now need
bison to build ruby, to use ruby, or does it meen that we're simply
forgetting other yacc-like parser generators and focus on just using
bison ?

thank you in advance.

 

[Yukihiro Matsumoto]

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby 1.9 needs bison?"
on Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:39:42 +0900, (e-mail address removed) (gabriele renzi @ google) writes:

|But there are two things that I don't understand:
|First, what are the implications of having a reentrant parser ?
|I mean, this was the only thing that was non reentrant, so this cange
|applies to ruby as a whole or was this just a change to make ripper
|happy?

Not it's just a beginning. It's the first step to the reentrant
interpreter.

|Second, what does it meen that now ruby requires bison? I used to
|think that bison could generate standalone parsers, do we now need
|bison to build ruby, to use ruby, or does it meen that we're simply
|forgetting other yacc-like parser generators and focus on just using
|bison ?

CVS users require bison to build ruby. The snapshot contains bison
generated parser. You don't need bison to compile snapshot.

matz.