I'm Jim Roskind, the author of the grammars. It is an honor to see my grammars still being discussed. These days I work at Amazon, but I can be found on Linke

I'm Jim Roskind, the author of the grammars. It is an honor to see my grammars still being discussed. These days I work at Amazon, but I can be found on LinkedIn. If contacted with a comment about the grammars (as opposed to a spam missive from a head hunter), I'll typically respond. What I really need to (finally) do someday is publish my hacks that I added to byacc to increase usability (I think I called it jryacc). I've always felt that yacc's "error reports" are kindred to having a compiler error listing limited to: "you have 7 severe errors, 3 errors, and 23 warnings," and a reference: "to understand the issues, please read the machine code." :-) With yacc, verbose output suggests (at best) that you read the "state transition diagrams" <ugh> to make sense of "n shift reduce, and m reduce-reduce conflicts." jryacc provided the shortest sequence of terminals to reach any state, identifies any non-terminal that is both left and right recursive (a common malady in grammar construction, which ensures ambiguity), the shortest sequence of terminals to construct each non-terminal, etc. ...oh... and not to fear... I have copies of the grammars and files mentioned... so hopefully they won't be too lost too soon. Thanks again for the interesting comments. Jim