Before this change, the start rule was the one named "start" and there
was an option to override that. This is now impossible.
The goal of this change is to contain all information for the parser
generation in the grammar itself.
In the future, some override directive for the start rule (like Bison's
"%start") may be added to the grammar.
I'll introduce labelled expressions shortly and I want to use ":" as a
label-expression separator. This change avoids conflict between the two
meanings of ":". (What would e.g. "foo: 'bar'" mean? Rule "foo"
matching string "bar", or string "bar" labelled "foo"?)
The mistakes weren't caught because the first one introduces a syntax
error, causing the whole test suite not to load. Unfortunately, QUnit
didn't complain so I missed this.
The real commit these changes belong to is
33a1a7c1e9.
This does not speed up the benchmark suite execution statistically significantly
on V8.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals):
---------------------------------
Test # Before After
---------------------------------
1 28.84 kB/s 28.75 kB/s
2 28.76 kB/s 28.69 kB/s
3 28.72 kB/s 28.69 kB/s
4 28.84 kB/s 28.93 kB/s
5 28.82 kB/s 28.70 kB/s
---------------------------------
Average 28.80 kB/s 28.75 kB/s
---------------------------------
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/5.0.342.9 Safari/533.2
This does not speed up the benchmark suite execution statistically significantly
on V8.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals):
---------------------------------
Test # Before After
---------------------------------
1 28.72 kB/s 28.84 kB/s
2 28.84 kB/s 28.76 kB/s
3 28.83 kB/s 28.72 kB/s
4 28.81 kB/s 28.84 kB/s
5 28.76 kB/s 28.82 kB/s
---------------------------------
Average 28.79 kB/s 28.80 kB/s
---------------------------------
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.9 Safari/533.2
The Rhino bug that prevented inclusion of \uFEFF among the whitespace characters
is no longer relevant here because we compile character classes into regexps
now, which avoids the infinite recursion.