So I thought that I’d get an easy start to Pass#2 by first developing the constant value pre-calculator. It seemed like a logical thing to do for starters because those pre-evaluated values will be needed in the actual compilation of executing code. So I started writing a procedure that iterates all constants from the symbol table, and then calculates their values. I had all these circular reference algorithms planned out and so on. But of course surprises do happen (actually I should have seen this coming from a mile away), and I figured that before I can implement this fancy stuff, there are a few other things to take care of.<\/p>\n
Wait, isn’t that the same precise thing I experienced in the beginning of Pass#1… oh, umm.. Yes it is! Back in Pass#1, I was hoping to get an easy start with simple statements such as Repeat…Until. But there’s no such thing as free lunch; I had to write the containing elements first (d’oh, of course!). Those being classes, functions and so on. On top of that, those statements just happened to be the most complicated ones, so plenty of general-purpose parsers needed to be written, too. So Pass#1 was quite frontloaded instead of backloaded a burden to chew on. As I’ve written in previous blog entries, the ending of Pass#1 went relatively quickly, and was just a copy-paste fest for the most part.<\/p>\n
So what’s the frontload here in Pass#2? Well, even though you now got your pretty symbol table and the source code on a silver platter, you will still need to solve the identifier name references correctly because constant expressions can have constant identifiers in them. These references couldn’t be made in Pass#1 because identifiers can be declared in random order. Sooo… now you find yourself together with Mr. Name Resolution. Oh, and also, please meet his brother Mr. Overload Resolver. Oh, and don’t forget their sister, Ms. Template Expander. Whoah, so I suddenly have these 3, mean looking procedures on my face – right from the start. I’m not kidding, these are probably THE 3 most<\/em> difficult entities for Pass#2. And again, they must<\/em> be almost completely implemented before proceeding onto further tasks. Okey, the Template Expander can wait a little bit. I can probably get this pre-calculator to work correctly on *simple code* with just the Name Resolution algorithm implemented, but the 2 remaining villains need to be taken care of soon after. <\/p>\n Name Resolution is essentially the process of matching source code identifier names to their actual declaration. An identifier can be located in some of the upper levels or in a completely different branch within the program hierarchy. When the identifier reference is being resolved, also the access modifiers are taken into account. All this follows a specific rule-set of the OOP member accessing. Basically, an entity always has access to upper levels, but requires Public access for branches. Inherited class-based reference to base classes can also have Protected access. Combine these to overloading, shadowing (hiding by name) and procedure overriding (hiding by name and signature), and you got yourself a nice little soup. But these are my problems anyways \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I have formulated algorithms for both constant expression calculation and name resolution, and I expect to carry them out during the up-coming weeks. The pre-calculator will be a big chunk of code. At this point in development, things get really interesting (and challenging).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I thought that I’d get an easy start to Pass#2 by first developing the constant value pre-calculator. It seemed like a logical thing to do for starters because those pre-evaluated values will be needed in the actual compilation of executing code. So I started writing a procedure that iterates all constants from the symbol […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[5,8],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coolbasic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}