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From: windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Porting output of Yacc and Lax to the IBbuM
Message-ID: <340@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: Thu, 8-Oct-87 00:12:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucdavis.340
Posted: Thu Oct  8 00:12:10 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 17:44:09 EDT
References: <468@aoa.UUCP>
Sender: uucp@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley)
Organization: U.C. Davis - College of Engineering
Lines: 38
Keywords: yacc lax ibm pc
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.ibm.pc:8801 comp.unix.questions:4447 comp.unix.wizards:4759

In article <468@aoa.UUCP> rob@aoa.UUCP (Rob Everton) writes:
>Seeking comments on the process of developing a small language
>compiler system for the ibm pc family using Yacc and Lax
>from a different machine, probably 3b1 unix pc's or something.
>
>Has anyone tried this? 
>
I recently *tried* (the operative word) to port an object-oriented
language developed here at UCD to an IBM.  I didn't have problems with
YACC and LEX, just things like memory models, etc.  Here's what I
learned about YACC and LEX from it:

   a) If you have access to another machine you can run your .y and .l
   filesd trough YACC and LEX respectively, giving you .c programs.
   Those will compile using Microsoft C 4.0 just fine (I used ULTRIX
   2.0 YACC and LEX, but I think that YACC and LEX are pretty
   standard, I could be wrong.)

   b) the parser will run fine.  The lexer will need to be linked with
   the lex library.  The lex library has four or five quite short
   routines like yyless().  I will leave it up to you to decide how
   you get the source and make a simlar library for your PC.

   c) Given the above two things, you don't need YACC and LEX for the
   PC if you have them available elsewhere.  The parser we wrote (which
   is not as large as an ADA parser, but still not insignificant,
   works great.  Since we were not careful with pointers/integers (and
   on a 32 bit machine, you don't really have to be) the rest runs
   fine on 68000's, VAX's, etc and crashes a 16 bit machine like the
   80286.  


Phil Windley
Robotics Research Lab
University of California, Davis
Phil Windley
Robotics Research Lab
University of California, Davis