Documenting tools necessary for GCC [draft]

[Joe Buck]

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 04:38:27PM -0400, Kaveh R. Ghazi wrote:
> 2.  The long term plan I heard from Mark was to merge the C parser
>     (and I assume objc) into the hand written one from C++, so
>     possibly needing bison there will go away too.

Right, and then hopefully get Objective-C++ contributions from Apple moved
into that as well.

> However I was not aware that the existing files supported anything
> other than bison, so it may simply be luck that it works today.  I
> don't know for sure.

In the old days, Cygnus used to use byacc for their builds, and supply
byacc rather than bison to their customers.  This was done because
originally the bison parser skeleton was GPLed, meaning that all bison
output had to be licensed under the GPL.  The FSF changed this with bison
1.24; bison output no longer must be copylefted (though of course bison
itself is still under the GPL).  Because of this, byacc has worked for a
long time, not by luck but by design.

The Java front end is newer work, though, and evidently uses some
bison-specific features.