Question

Say I have this C program.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  int monday = 1;
  int tuesday = 2;

  if(monday == tuesday) { fprintf("I should quit my day job"); }

  return 1;
}

What would the tokens be?

What does bison provide me, as a programmer? Certianly, bison does not generate machine code with just a parser grammar? So how do I interface with bison? I am not expecting a full answer here, just a pointer to good websites and books.

Answer 1

Bison implements a generalized LR parser. See http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/bison.html for fairly extensive documentation, with examples. You don’t get back a parse tree per se; instead, you write “actions” that activate on each reduction. Of course, if your actions simply build a parse tree, that will do the trick, if you want to obtain a parse tree. Modern bison also has a lot of extra tweaking you can insert.