[net.lang] Possible YACC Bug

bhilden@druxj.UUCP (HildenbrandBE) (01/25/85)

I ran across a rather funny problem with YACC and am hoping
that I can get some feedback as to whether this is a bug
or just the breaking of a rule of YACC input syntax.

The problem centers around what follows a left curly brace({).
In the document "YACC-- Yet another Compiler-Compiler" by
Stephen Johnson on page 27 the valid tokens that
are allowed to follow the brace are 'act' which I guess
mean action items.  

If my input stream looks like this:

		{ action

then YACC generates good relocatable object code.
If my input stream looks like this:

		{
		  action

then the object code generated has negative line numbers, etc.
and fails in the load step.

Having written a parser or two, I am wondering why these two streams
should appear any different to the YACC parser.  Certainly it must
be smart enough to ignore white space and EOL characters.

So, have I broken a cardinal sin, or is this YAYACCB ?

Please mail your responses, as I am not a regular reader of
this newsgroup.

		Thanks in advance,
		Bruce Hildenbrand
		ihnp4!druxj!bhilden

p.s.- I hope I've done an adequate job of explaining the problem.