Bison is a parser generator. You hand it a grammar, it hands you a program that can parse that grammar. Handy little thing, and GNU Open Source to boot.

Ruby uses bison. I got started on this when Steve Yegge blogged about hiring Ruby programmers and I found myself wanting in a couple of skills areas. I need to grok more on Ruby’s use of bison, I think. No better way than to teach oneself.

Ruby’s source is no secret. Everyone can download it. Bison’s docs are also out there.

Update: Done some reading at Wikipedia. Some articles are there, but I need more storytelling, less listing of data.

Got me the Ruby source which was very, very easy to do. Now I can read it.