This directory contains the Bison parser generator.

See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.

It was once true that, when installing Bison on Sequent (or Pyramid?)
systems, you had to be in the Berkeley universe.  This may no longer
be true; we have no way to tell.

On VMS, you will probably have to create Makefile from Makefile.in by
hand.  Remember to do `SET COMMAND BISON' to install the data in
`BISON.CLD'.

Most of the code here is bison v1.25; the modifications required to
generate perl code are relatively minor and do not add any
functionality to the core. Please send perl-related bug reports to
sfink@cs.berkeley.edu. I am not the maintainer of bison; I have only
issued this modified release. Note that this is an alpha
release. Someday, I would like to rewrite my changes (as well as parts
of the regular .y file parser), but I'm putting it out now because it
looks like it may be a while before I can get around to working on
this again.

There is a fairly good chance that I will be working on related tools
in the near future, including a perl-only parser generator and a
graphical parser debugging utility (as in, watch the parse tree as it
is being built, ask for explanations of why there is a shift/reduce
conflict in state 412 and what input stream might cause it to occur,
etc.) If either of the above sound interesting and/or useful, please
send me email at sfink@cs.berkeley.edu before mid-May, 1998. I will be
doing this for a user interface class, and user comments and
suggestions are extremely important and helpful. After May, I would
still gratefully welcome all comments or suggestions; warm fuzzies and
a vague feeling of being useful to humanity are why I'm doing this. ;-)

Send all other bug reports to bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu.  If you
think the problem might be related to the perl-related additions,
please try using an unmodified bison first (and if you don't need the
perl support, you should not be using this version until it's at least
a beta release!) Please include the version number from 
`bison --version', and a complete, self-contained test case in each bug
report.
