Making a programming language Part 7b - using objects

Table of contents,  Whole project on github

Something like EPIC FAIL occured to me and I published a post containing only half the content I intended to write. So I’m doing a part b.

My intended usage of objects is something along the lines of

objectName.someProperty
objectName.someFunction()
someFunction().someProperty
someObject.someProperty.someFunction().someProperty.someFunction

Explanation

1. getting a value from an object
2. invoking a function contained in an object
3. getting a value from returned object of the invoked function
4. a bit contrived example. Invoking a function contained inside a property(object) of an object and then getting a function value from a property of the returned value from the first function. That’s a mouthful, just read the damn code instead

Dot access

So everything bases on those little dots. First my thoughts were something like “you just do expr <- expr | expr.expr”. This is just wrong. At least I should have reversed the order as this leads to infinite left recursion. Then I might have got away. Then I realized I only need dots after function calls and simple identifiers. Design choice(if you think it’s a bad one leave a comment). Notice the “simple identifier”. That’s what I did: Renamed identifier to simple identifier and put something that handles dots under name identifier. And then fixed everything. 

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case class DotAccess(lst: List[Expression]) extends Expression

private def identifier: Parser[DotAccess] =
    rep1sep((functionCall | simpleIdentifier), ".") ^^ DotAccess.apply

That’s about it. At least for parsing. Now the fun begins.

Nesting scopes

Scopes were designed with nesting in mind. This is a double edged sword. See, the “privates” can be  done if you rely on not being able to access the parent scope. If dot access exposes full addressing functionality a powerful feature ceases to exist. So some protection should be in place. Something like strict get

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class SScope
  ...
  def getStrict(key: String): Option[Any] = map.get(key)
  ...

And I also added an unlinked view to it just to ease usage. This is just a method that returns new SScope with no parent overriding getters and put to use map available in closure. So now I can walk down the list in DotAccess recursively and explicitly override the implicit scope parameter. And everything automagically works. Well, not quite. If you have a function call, the arguments need to be evaluated in top scope. Not in the nested one like the function identifier. At first I didn’t even think about this and only failing attempts at more complex recursion brought up this quite obvious bug.
So how to solve this? I could pre-evaluate all arguments, but I use recursion to do this and it’s two levels(at least) deeper from where dots happen. So no go. I need to carry on the outer scope. I overloaded the apply method from Evaluator so other code can still function(tests ftw!) and all in all it looks like this:

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def apply(e: List[Expression])(implicit scope: SScope): Any = {
  (e map apply).lastOption match {
    case Some(a) => a
    case None => ()
  }
}

def apply(e: Expression)(implicit scope: SScope): Any = apply(e, None)(scope)

def apply(e: Expression, auxScope: Option[SScope])
         (implicit scope: SScope): Any = e match {
  ...
  case DotAccess(list) =>
    val outerScope = scope
    def step(list: List[Expression])
            (implicit scope: SScope): Any = list match {
      case Nil =>
        throw new ScratInvalidTokenError("got empty list in DotAccess")
      case elem :: Nil => apply(elem, Some(scope))(outerScope)
      case head :: tail => apply(head) match {
        case s: SScope => step(tail)(s.unlinked)
        case other =>
          throw new ScratInvalidTypeError("expected scope, got " + other)
      }
    }
    step(list)
}

So an optional aux scope is the answer. It doesn’t seem pretty to me, but it does the job. 

**next: **trying to go faster

Last modified on 2012-10-08