Bison switching to .gv Graphviz output

Show and Tell
1

Bison 3.7 was recently released, with the accompanying release notes containing this snippet:

In conformance with the recommendations of the Graphviz team, in the next
version Bison the option --graph will generate a *.gv file by default,
instead of *.dot. A transition started in Bison 3.4.

I thought this was interesting because (1) I had no idea Bison could generate Graphviz and (2) I did not realize .gv was preferred over .dot. Maybe these are widely known to others.

The recommendation seems to have come on a mailing list thread, pointing to a Wikipedia page, pointing to Emden’s recommendation in 2011.

2

Oh, .dot is document template in word. TIL.

3

I was aware of this, but I still use .dot because I like Graphviz and the DOT language, but I don’t like Microsoft or Windows.

Also discussed in https://forum.graphviz.org/t/what-is-the-file-extension-for-dot-file/3