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Bugs and Deficiencies

Internal versions of the Zyacc parser generator have been used by me since 1995. It has been used by about 45 students in compiler construction courses. There have been some major rewrites.

Suspicions

Normally, when a program has been completed, one has a reasonable idea where bugs might still lurk. On that basis, for what they are worth, I present my current suspicions:

The Parser Generator
I feel fairly good about the code which actually generates parsers. Under normal error-free operation, the weakest areas may be the code which does the LALR computation and the graph coloring for packing inherited attributes (since most states of most parsers can get by with SLR lookahead and most programs I've written didn't make very heavy use of inherited attributes, the code has just not been exercised enough). The bugs most likely to manifest themselves will probably be assertion failures caused by an erroneous Zyacc source file. In that case, you can simply correct the error in the Zyacc source file and continue on with reasonable confidence (after submitting a bug report, of course).
The Runtime System
The runtime system has been fairly stable for a while. The weakest area may be error processing.

Bug Reports

First you will need to be sure that you have found a Zyacc bug:

If you are sure that you have uncovered a bug, try to distil it down to a test program which is as short as possible while still exhibiting the bug. Record a log which exhibits the bug. Make sure that you mention the version of Zyacc you are using in your bug report.

Bug reports can be mailed to:

zdu@acm.org

Feedback: Please email any feedback to zdu@acm.org.


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