Why bison is becoming extinct

Abstract

At some point in your career, you're going to implement a computer language. You probably won't be implementing Java or C++. You may not even recognize it as a language. Truth be told, there are an awful lot of domain-specific languages, or "little languages" [7] in common use: configuration files, HTML/XML documents, shell scripts, network protocols, mail headers, command-line arguments. The list goes on. A number of programs allow you to write scripts to control their operation; infact, just the other day I downloaded a neural network simulator which provided a little programming language to steer the simulation.How will you implement your language? There's the ad hoc approach, of course, but it's not well suited to languages whose design is complex or frequently changing. You also end up writing code to perform tasks which can be effectively automated.You might also consider using existing languages like Tcl [18] and Python [6]. These languages are designed to either be embedded in an existing application, or easily extended. This is a good solution when it can be used, saving a lot of time and effort. However, there may be concerns about tying your language to one which is itself changing, or the syntax and semantics of your language may not match those of such a "host" language.A third approach is to use compiler tools to implement your language. Most were designed for the implementation of large programming languages, but the same principles and techniques apply equally well to little languages. This article is the story of one such tool -- a parser generator tool -- and more importantly, what sort of tool is going to replace it, and why.