New identifier definitions

Today I effectively scrapped the entire AnalyseSyntax()-function in the compiler and wrote it all over again from the scratch. Then I realised that the rewrite wasn’t much better then the original so I scrapped that too. And I did it again. I ended up with version 4 of that procedure. The reason? Gathering the identifiers can be done in many ways. There are good ways and not so good ways. The essential difference of these algorithms derives from only one fact: which ever ends up being the most dynamical one, tends to make future updates easier.

So what is the key that all new identifiers have in common in BASIC languages? It’s the keyword “As”. My original system scanned the modifiers and flag values within statements with no strict relations between them. This resulted in lots of extra conditions and made my code a bit tangly. The next version tried to build statements keyword by keyword eventually forming the statement with all attributes included. Since keywords have dependencies on each other and strictly pre-defined legal order in which they can appear, it was made impossible to make them “conditional” especially when they appear before the actual keyword that identifies the statement.

Then there was an option to use regexp templates on structural representation of the statement. However, this can lead to problems with non-constant syntaxes like function or operator declarations, or array definitions; typically everything that can have comma-separated parameters.

Finally, the best solution (so far) was to scan the entire statement token by token, just like I did in the first place, but this time by defining rules how keywords can be linked. Basically, each modifier and flag value has list of those keywords that can lead to them – including line start. This will ensure that no keyword can be out of place nor out of context. In addition, it should be easy to add new keywords in the future.

So what is now done? It’s still the constants. But I hope I’ve created a base on which I can start building new things soon. Oh, and I did something else, too: You can now define new instances just like in Visual Basic, “Dim i As New k” is equivalent to “Dim i As k = New k“