According to this swtch.com essay, "GNU Bison can optionally generate a GLR parser instead of an LALR(1) parsers" and checking history shows that GLR was availa

According to this swtch.com essay, "GNU Bison can optionally generate a GLR parser instead of an LALR(1) parsers" and checking history shows that GLR was available in Bison 1.75 in 2002 (See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2002-10/msg00008.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2002-10/msg00008.... .) Regarding "so language specific"; proper language support for a given language is hard, and that's where most of the development time goes. Adding support for two languages is more than twice as hard as support for one language. Take a look at the comments for Java support in Bison, at http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/bison.html#Java-Parsers http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/bison.html#Java-Par... to see some of the difficulties and incomplete aspects of that port. Now consider a port to Python, which doesn't have a switch statement so likely needs very different code generation style.