[ANN] Chuck type inferencer
Colin Putney
cputney at wiresong.ca
Tue Jun 8 14:12:41 UTC 2004
On Jun 7, 2004, at 4:35 PM, Marcel Weiher wrote:
> However, I think it would be even better if we decoupled the
> execution-object-tree (whatever you want to call it) from the syntax
> tree generated by the compiler. After all, one particular syntax is
> just another view onto the code (MVC), right? ;-)
Hmm, I'm not sure I buy that. If there's some representation of a
Smalltalk method that is a more general high-level abstraction than an
AST, I'd like to know what it is. (Note that I'm talking about an
abstract, not concrete, syntax tree).
The AST for a Smalltalk method is pretty clean. There isn't a whole lot
in the syntax that isn't related to the semantics of the method's
execution. So it wouldn't be difficult to create parsers and pretty
printers to support alternate syntax. But really, why bother? Does
anyone actually use the alternate syntax we already have? I am
interested in alternate views of the code, just not alternate *syntax.*
Also, keeping the AST reasonably equivalent to it's textual
representation has a lot of advantages - you can write tools like the
refactoring browser or the debugger that present the code the
programmer textually, but operate on the AST internally.
> "ExpressionObjects" can be structured CompiledMethods and much, much
> more...
Like what?
Colin
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