Links and Resources for Emboss Developers

C++

• ISO C++ drafts
• C++14 final draft
• C++17 initial draft (C++14 + minor fixes)
• Final publicly-available drafts for each C++ revision
• cppreference
• cplusplus.com reference
• Compiler Explorer (Godbolt)

C++ Weirdness

• Some background about uint8_t vs unsigned char from GCC archives
• A bug story: data alignment on x86
• Casting unsigned to signed on OpenVMS HP C++ on Itanium

Python

• Python official documentation, current
• Python official documentation, v3.9 (oldest non-EOL until October 2025)
• CPython lifecycle calendar

Bit Manipulation Tricks

• Sean Eron Anderson's Bit Twiddling Hacks page
  • But be careful copying code snippets: some of the C code is either non-portable or invokes undefined behavior.
• Hacker's Delight, Second Edition, by Henry S. Warren, Jr. (book)

Parsers

• “On the translation of languages from left to right”, Knuth, D., 1965

  • The paper that introduced shift-reduce parsers, and the “Canonical LR” table generation algorithm.

• “Efficient Computation of LALR(1) Look-Ahead Sets”, DeRemer, D. & Pennello, T., 1982

  • The paper that introduced the LALR(1) table generation algorithm used in Berkeley YACC and GNU Bison.

• “Generating LR Syntax Error Messages from Examples”, Jeffery, C., 2003

  • Link to non-paywalled copy
  • The paper that introduced the Merr error marking system. Emboss uses this algorithm for specifying parser errors.

• “The IELR(1) algorithm for generating minimal LR(1) parser tables for non-LR(1) grammars with conflict resolution”, Denny, J. & Malloy, B., 2010

  • An algorithm for generating minimal parser tables for LR(1) languages.

• “Practical LR Parser Generation”, Zimmerman, J., 2022

  • Many improvements on LR(1) parsing.

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, Second Edition, by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (the “Dragon Book”)