Re: Interactive parsing with Bison

[Hans Aberg]

On 27 Jun 2006, at 12:35, Richard Stallman wrote:
    A problem with this type of GUI is that they usually are centered
    around a limited set of commercial applications: it works well as
    long one stays within that limited scope, but one is left out  
in the
    cold if  one steps outside.

    For example, the use of a "make" file gives full programming  
control,
    that the type of IDE you mention does not.

If the GUI outputs a Bison parser, you can then build it under the
control of make.  You could think of this kind of interface as an
alternate editor for .y files.

The kind of GUI that Satya (and I) are thinking of, is the one that  
one drops in some source files into the GUI, and it does the rest,  
computing the dependicies. It works well, and provides rapid  
development, for single platform applications, but is insufficient  
for more complicated projects. The approach may go out of the window  
for such simple reasons as one needs special compile options for  
specific files. So I think a project might be able to use an  
approach, such as the one you suggest, initially in its nursery, but  
then would have to move away from the GUI altogether. Then one should  
perhaps try to find a more advanced GUI approach from the beginning -  
I think it might be done, but it is not so straightforward. Probably  
an interesting problem to work with, though.

  Hans Aberg