Re: Bison i18n patches installed

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden writes:

> Re: Bison i18n patches installed
> yet-another patch needed in yacc.c?
> See comment on alloca below from:
> GNU gettext library from gettext-0.14.5

> file: gettext-runtime/intl/plural.y
> ...
> /* The bison generated parser uses alloca.  AIX 3 forces us to put this
>    declaration at the beginning of the file.  The declaration in bison's
>    skeleton file comes too late.  This must come before <config.h>
>    because <config.h> may include arbitrary system headers.  */
> #if defined _AIX && !defined __GNUC__
>  #pragma alloca
> #endif

This comment in plural.y applies only to older versions of Bison.
Starting with Bison 2.0, Bison-generated C parsers do not use alloca
unless you ask for it (by defining YYSTACK_USE_ALLOCA to a nonzero
value), and plural.y doesn't ask for it.  I assume that gettext is
intended to be portable to older versions of Bison, which is why that
comment is still there.

I suggest removing the above lines from plural.y.  According to
<http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aix-faq/part1/section-7.html> IBM stopped
selling AIX 3 on 1997-01-31 and stopped responding to (most) defect
reports on 1997-12-31.  I doubt whether anyone is seriously using new
gettext releases on AIX 3 any more, and there's little point to having
the GNU project support AIX 3 if even IBM doesn't.

Failing that, the comment could be modified to say that the #pragma is
not needed if you are using Bison 2.0 or later.