Needing to add path-hopper

Tristan B. Kildaire

2021/08/11

Tags: typechecking dependency static oop tree paths grandresolver

Path hopper

The parser when it sees:

int o = new A().l.p.p;

Will see a variable declaration for o of type int and then an atached VariableAssignment with the expression, new A().l.p.p which is actually just 3 expressions. The outer layer is a BinaryOperatorExpression, with an LHS of new A() and an RHS of l.p.p. You might be thinking ae there not more bin-ops? Nope, the lexer returns l.p.p as one unit to the parser, it is seen simply as some Entity (an object with a name). It is smart as to when to do this, it knows that a dot must be followed and in the case here we end the first expression with . as it was preceded by new A() (it’s the () which set it off). Then the first dot splits this up, however we check backwards each step after encountering a dot, if what follows is not a dot valid for a path, say now a number out of nowhere (as the first character), then we produce tokens new A(), . and 1a in an example such as:

new A().13

However, if it was:

new A().a12.a

Then we’d have the tokens new A(), ., a12.. So this is what we would want out of a lexer such that we can then easily get the proper parsing as such done, making sure the right kinds (potentially) of entities follow (not yet typechecked).

However, when we do dependency checking we must actually resolve this path (which we alreayd have a tool for, the grand resolver). But we must visit each hop, and do a dependency check depending on the type of thing it refers to.

Infact we must do the following:

  1. Make sure each entity in the path (as we process each) exists name-wise
  2. Make sure we init along the way if possible and given the current context
    1. Context implies the static or non-static nature of what we are accessing (so more of a type-checking thing)
      1. One remark, the way this is built is to only init, so static etc and some sanity chekcing for non-static
      2. Therefore there is no typechecking on this yet, we will do that once the tree is made as that means no look-behinds
      3. Which would be impossible, a lookahead after processing could work however, mmmh, still thinking
    2. Initialization means to init it, add it to the dependency tree
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