lex & yacc, 2nd Edition

Appendix D. GNU Bison

The GNU project’s yacc replacement is called bison. Briefly, GNU (Gnu’s Not UNIX) is the project of the Free Software Foundation and is an attempt to create a UNIX-like operating system with source code available publicly (although GNU is not public domain, it is freely available and has a license intended to keep it freely available). Hence, bison is available to anyone. For more information on how to obtain bison, GNU, or the Free Software Foundation, contact:

         Free Software Foundation, Inc.          675 Massachusetts Avenue          Cambridge, MA 02139          [phone]       

Users with access to the Internet can FTP bison and all other GNU software from prep.ai.mit.edu in the directory /pub/gnu.

Parsers generated with some versions of bison are subject to the GNU “copyleft” software license which sets conditions on the distribution of GNU and GNU-derived software. If you plan to use bison to develop a program distributed to others, be sure to check the file COPYING included with the bison distribution to see if you agree to the terms.

This description reflects bison version 1.18, which was released in May 1992.

Differences

In general, bison is compatible with yacc, although there are occasional yacc grammars that do not work properly with bison. Bison is derived from an early version of Berkeley yacc, but each has been developed independently for several years and there are now many small differences. Nevertheless, bison can often be a boon when ...