5.6 Reduce/Reduce Conflicts

A reduce/reduce conflict occurs if there are two or more rules that apply to the same sequence of input. This usually indicates a serious error in the grammar.

For example, here is an erroneous attempt to define a sequence of zero or more word groupings.

sequence:
  %empty         { printf ("empty sequence\n"); }
| maybeword
| sequence word  { printf ("added word %s\n", $2); }
;

maybeword:
  %empty    { printf ("empty maybeword\n"); }
| word      { printf ("single word %s\n", $1); }
;

The error is an ambiguity: there is more than one way to parse a single word into a sequence. It could be reduced to a maybeword and then into a sequence via the second rule. Alternatively, nothing-at-all could be reduced into a sequence via the first rule, and this could be combined with the word using the third rule for sequence.

There is also more than one way to reduce nothing-at-all into a sequence. This can be done directly via the first rule, or indirectly via maybeword and then the second rule.

You might think that this is a distinction without a difference, because it does not change whether any particular input is valid or not. But it does affect which actions are run. One parsing order runs the second rule’s action; the other runs the first rule’s action and the third rule’s action. In this example, the output of the program changes.

Bison resolves a reduce/reduce conflict by choosing to use the rule that appears first in the grammar, but it is very risky to rely on this. Every reduce/reduce conflict must be studied and usually eliminated. Here is the proper way to define sequence:

sequence:
  %empty         { printf ("empty sequence\n"); }
| sequence word  { printf ("added word %s\n", $2); }
;

Here is another common error that yields a reduce/reduce conflict:

sequence:
  %empty
| sequence words
| sequence redirects
;

words:
  %empty
| words word
;

redirects:
  %empty
| redirects redirect
;

The intention here is to define a sequence which can contain either word or redirect groupings. The individual definitions of sequence, words and redirects are error-free, but the three together make a subtle ambiguity: even an empty input can be parsed in infinitely many ways!

Consider: nothing-at-all could be a words. Or it could be two words in a row, or three, or any number. It could equally well be a redirects, or two, or any number. Or it could be a words followed by three redirects and another words. And so on.

Here are two ways to correct these rules. First, to make it a single level of sequence:

sequence:
  %empty
| sequence word
| sequence redirect
;

Second, to prevent either a words or a redirects from being empty:

sequence:
  %empty
| sequence words
| sequence redirects
;

words:
  word
| words word
;

redirects:
  redirect
| redirects redirect
;

Yet this proposal introduces another kind of ambiguity! The input ‘word word’ can be parsed as a single words composed of two ‘word’s, or as two one-word words (and likewise for redirect/redirects). However this ambiguity is now a shift/reduce conflict, and therefore it can now be addressed with precedence directives.

To simplify the matter, we will proceed with word and redirect being tokens: "word" and "redirect".

To prefer the longest words, the conflict between the token "word" and the rule ‘sequence: sequence words’ must be resolved as a shift. To this end, we use the same techniques as exposed above, see Using Precedence For Non Operators. One solution relies on precedences: use %prec to give a lower precedence to the rule:

%precedence "word"
%precedence "sequence"
%%

sequence:
  %empty
| sequence word      %prec "sequence"
| sequence redirect  %prec "sequence"
;

words:
  word
| words "word"
;

Another solution relies on associativity: provide both the token and the rule with the same precedence, but make them right-associative:

%right "word" "redirect"
%%

sequence:
  %empty
| sequence word      %prec "word"
| sequence redirect  %prec "redirect"
;