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Bison provides a Yacc compatibility mode in which it strives to conform with the POSIX standard. Grammar files which are written to the POSIX standard, and do not take advantage of any of the special capabilities of Bison, should work with many versions of Bison without modification.
All other features of Bison are particular to Bison, and are changing. Bison is actively maintained and continuously evolving. It should come as no surprise that an older version of Bison will not accept Bison source code which uses newer features that do no not exist at all in the older Bison. Regrettably, in spite of reasonable effort to maintain compatibility, the reverse situation may also occur: it may happen that code developed using an older version of Bison does not build with a newer version of Bison without modifications.
Because Bison is a code generation tool, it is possible to retain its output and distribute that to the users of the program. The users are then not required to have Bison installed at all, only an implementation of the programming language, such as C, which is required for processing the generated output.
It is the output of Bison that is intended to be of the utmost portability. So, that is to say, whereas the Bison grammar source code may have a dependency on specific versions of Bison, the generated parser from any version of Bison should work with with a large number of implementations of C, or whatever language is applicable.
The recommended best practice for using Bison (in the context of software that is distributed in source code form) is to ship the generated parser to the downstream users. Only those downstream users who engage in active development of the program who need to make changes to the grammar file need to have Bison installed at all, and those users can install the specific version of Bison which is required.
Following this recommended practice also makes it possible to use a more recent Bison than what is available to users through operating system distributions, thereby taking advantage of the latest techniques that Bison allows.
Some features of Bison have been, or are being adopted into other Yacc-like programs. Therefore it might seem that is a good idea to write grammar code which targets multiple implementations, similarly to the way C programs are often written to target multiple compilers and language versions. Other than the Yacc subset described by POSIX, the Bison language is not rigorously standardized. When a Bison feature is adopted by another parser generator, it may be initially compatible with that version of Bison on which it was based, but the compatibility may degrade going forward. Developers who strive to make their Bison code simultaneously compatible with other parser generators are encouraged to nevertheless use specific versions of all generators, and still follow the recommended practice of shipping generated output. For example, a project can internally maintain compatibility with multiple generators, and choose the output of a particular one to ship to the users. Or else, the project could ship all of the outputs, arranging for a way for the user to specify which one is used to build the program.
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