Date:	Tue, 11 Mar 1997 23:29:24 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Gregory Allen <gregorya AT hawaii DOT edu>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: bison asks for .\shared\bison.simple
In-Reply-To:	<3324F40C.20FC@hawaii.edu>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.970311232900.2704L-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Gregory Allen wrote:

> I'm using bison for a school project, and I was wondering -- why does
> bison fail if it can't find .\shared\bison.simple ?
> 
> I found only bison.sim in the Bsn124b.zip archive from the djgpp
> archives.  I made a shared dir, and I copied that file into the new dir
> as bison.simple, thinking that the dos extension may have truncated it.
> No more complaints when I run bison.  1st Q: Was this the correct thing
> to do?

No, it's not how it's supposed to work.  You should have set the
environment variable BISON_SIMPLE to point to the full pathname of
that file, and then you could put it anywhere you like.  The /share
subdirectory is the default place built into Bison (that's where that
file is usually placed on Unix), but on MSDOS it is inconvenient: if
you have more than one disk drive, you'd need to duplicate it on each
drive.

If you have the standard DJGPP installation (djdev201.zip) you should
have a file DJGPP.ENV that already sets BISON_SIMPLE to point to the
lib directory where bison.sim unzips.  In that case, please make sure
that you preserve the directory structure when you unzip bsn124b.zip
(did you use the -d switch to PKUNZIP?).

And btw, you don't need to bother about the truncation of the filename
unless you run Bison from the DOS box on Windows 95.

> Now I move to my source file directory and run bison, and I again have
> the same error.  So when I run bison, I now have to provide a full
> pathname to my src file.  2nd Q:  Can I change this with a environment
> variable, so bison finds, or ignores shared\bison.simple?

Yes, see above.

> 3rd Q: (trivia fodder for me) what purpose does the bison.simple file
> have, and why hard-code it's location?

It holds the skeleton of the parser generated by Bison.  It is on a
file to keep the Bison binary from being much larger, and to let you
change the skeleton without recompiling Bison.  When Bison generates
the parser according to your grammar (blabla.y), it replaces some
placeholders in the skeleton (look for the dollar signs) with your
code.  The hard-coded place is just a default, like I explained above.

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