Bison - Grammar language

Bison is an open source grammar language created in 1985 by Robert Corbett.

#366on PLDB

39Years Old

196Repos

GNU bison, commonly known as Bison, is a parser generator that is part of the GNU Project. Bison reads a specification of a context-free language, warns about any parsing ambiguities, and generates a parser (either in C, C++, or Java) which reads sequences of tokens and decides whether the sequence conforms to the syntax specified by the grammar. Bison by default generates LALR parsers but can also create GLR parsers. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: grammarLanguage
There are at least 196 Bison repos on GitHub
Early development of Bison happened in GNU Project
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 3k users using Bison in 4k repos on GitHub
Bison on HOPL
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for Bison
See also: (12 related languages) C, M4, Java, Yacc, Ruby, PHP, Go, Bash, LilyPond, PostgreSQL, MySQL, GNU Octave
Read more about Bison on the web: 1.
1 PLDB concepts link to Bison: Lemon

Example from the web:

/* Reverse Polish Notation calculator. */

%{
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <math.h>
  int yylex (void);
  void yyerror (char const *);
%}

%define api.value.type {double}
%token NUM

%% /* Grammar rules and actions follow. */

Example from Wikipedia:

# Makefile

FILES	= Lexer.c Parser.c Expression.c main.c
CC	= g++
CFLAGS	= -g -ansi

test:		$(FILES)
		$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(FILES) -o test

Lexer.c:	Lexer.l
		flex Lexer.l

Parser.c:	Parser.y Lexer.c
		bison Parser.y

clean:
		rm -f *.o *~ Lexer.c Lexer.h Parser.c Parser.h test

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Comments	✓	// A comment
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* A comment */	/* */
Line Comments	✓	// A comment	//
Semantic Indentation	X