[Caml-list] New release of Menhir (20141215)

[Francois Pottier <Francois.Pottier@inria.fr>]

Dear OCaml users,

I have recently started making a series of changes in Menhir, inspired by
the work of Frédéric Bour on Merlin (a smart emacs-mode for OCaml, which
uses a modified version of Menhir). Thanks to Frédéric for his stimulating
ideas, and thanks to Gabriel Scherer for not letting me sleep until I
promised I would do something about them! :-)

I have made a first release a couple days ago. The relevant chunk of the
CHANGES file is appended below. In summary, a new incremental API is
available; Menhir now requires ocaml 4.02; and a couple of obscure features
(--error-recovery and $previouserror) have been removed in the interest of
speed and simplicity.

The incremental API means that you can take a snapshot of the parser's state,
essentially at no cost, at any time. It also means that the parser no longer
drives the lexer; you drive the lexer, and you provide tokens to the parser
when it requests them. This can be convenient if the lexer is in a monad (the
Lwt monad, for instance).

More changes are planned. The type "env" exposed by the new incremental API is
currently opaque. We are planning to offer a range of functions that allow
inspecting and building values of type "env". This should allow the user to
implement new error handling and error recovery strategies outside of Menhir.

The new release is available now as a .tar.gz archive:

  http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/menhir/menhir-20141215.tar.gz

It is also available via opam ("opam install menhir").

Cheers,

-- 
François Pottier
Francois.Pottier@inria.fr
http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/

2014/12/15:
New incremental API (in --table mode only), inspired by Frédéric Bour.

2014/12/11:
Menhir now reports an error if one of the start symbols produces
either the empty language or the singleton language {epsilon}.

Although some people out there actually define a start symbol that recognizes
{epsilon} (and use it as a way of initializing or re-initializing some global
state), this is considered bad style. Furthermore, by ruling out this case, we
are able to simplify the table back-end a little bit.

2014/12/12:
A speed improvement in the code back-end.

2014/12/08:
Menhir now requires OCaml 4.02 (instead of 3.09).

2014/12/02:
Removed support for the $previouserror keyword.
Removed support for --error-recovery mode.