Re: confusing bison error

[Jot Dot]

Thanks for everyone's help. Problem is resolved.
I was asking Akim about what he said: FWIW, I prefer to explicitly "continue;" 
in these cases."If you have a moment of time Akim, can you explain? If not, I 
can do some googling on this.Naturally you're busy and I don't want to waste 
your time.
By the way Christian:re: "as any email client can do that for you 
automatically, including the one you are using there"Do not make assumptions 
like that. Ask a question first.I compose as much emails in one year as you 
might do in one day.The primitive web-based email client that came with my 
account has no method to do quoting. It barely does the basics.
There is some 'blockquote' feature that is buggy and it doesn't work for me.No 
help section to read about what this web-based client can do.I try to make it 
stand out manually but obviously I fail at times,
And please give examples. I don't know what you know. Otherwise I wouldn't be 
here.Just saying "A good editor usually immediately points you at such errors 
..." does not really help me.Better to say: "A good text editor like a or b 
(there are many) usually immediately ..."I'm new at flex/bison.I was using a 
simple text editor.I am not aware others even existed - the ones you have 
hinted at but failed to mention.But I do thank you for taking the time to 
respond.
Thanks everyone for your time and input.It has really helped me along my way.


----- Original Message -----
From: Christian Schoenebeck <schoenebeck@crudebyte.com>
To: help-bison@gnu.org
Cc: Jot Dot <jotdot@shaw.ca>, Akim Demaille <akim@lrde.epita.fr>
Sent: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:27:39 -0700 (MST)
Subject: Re: confusing bison error

On Freitag, 27. November 2020 11:20:29 CET Jot Dot wrote:
> I learned to distrust Flex's handling of comments when they are in column 0.
> 
> Yea, I'm starting to notice "something is up" with the first column.

Like Akim pointed out, you should never place comments on the first column in 
Flex's rules section (i.e. the entire scope after %% ), because Flex would 
interpret them as patterns.

A good editor usually immediately points you at such errors by at least syntax 
highlighting them as RegEx patterns instead of comment highlighting. So just 
prepend a space character in front of those comments and that's it.

> FWIW, I prefer to explicitly "continue;" in these cases.
> 
> I'm a flex/bison newbie. Can you explain? (Not sure of "continue"). Any
> additional info is always welcome. I don't have any preferences since I
> just started with the idea of using something like flex/bison in my code.
> Before that, it was just some abstract concepts floating in my head. Well,
> not totally true. A couple years back I tried ANTLR but it was way too
> bug-ridden to be of any use. And the bug-report end was a bit uncaring and
> hostile imo. I wasted too much time with it.

Please do us all a favour and use quote characters when you are quoting 
somebody in your emails. It's unnecessary to let people decipher who wrote 
what, as any email client can do that for you automatically, including the one 
you are using there.

Best regards,
Christian Schoenebeck