Integrating Bison/Flex/Yacc into XCode

AWF4vk picture AWF4vk · Jun 9, 2011 · Viewed 8.8k times · Source

Is there a simple way for integrating Bison/Flex/Yacc into XCode?

I want to write my own language to be parsed, which interacts with my ObjC objects.

But the tools will only take STDIN as input, and will only produce C code, instead of ObjC. They're basically only seem useful for command-line tools, otherwise they need massive pain to override the output every time I regenerate the parser code.

Answer

Sherm Pendley picture Sherm Pendley · Jun 11, 2011

In a nutshell, give your grammar files a .ym extension instead of .y. Xcode will then run Bison with the necessary magic to support Objective-C.

Oddly enough, I found this question because I wanted to do the same thing. I remembered a discussion about it on Apple's cocoa-dev mailing list, but this question came up higher in my Google search. I found the discussion I remembered though, on CocoaBuilder - there's a pretty extensive example at the end. I hope it helps both of us, LOL!

(Edit) Beats the heck out of me how anyone ever managed to find this out, by the way - I still haven't found any official documentation about it.