Re: [Ctool-develop] little fixes

[Steven S. <ste...@cs...>]

Shaun Flisakowski wrote:
> As for your comment about vectors, cTool was originally written in C (as 
> the poorly named "CTree", which I now know is also a database product).  
> With version 2.0, I changed over to C++ so a class hierarchy could be 
> used to clean up the resulting AST - I was not looking to rewrite from 
> scratch using C++.

I know about CTree. I've used that too.

CTool is a huge improvement in usability over CTree, the interfaces are
much cleaner. The latest program I tried to write I started with CTree
because that's what I had handy and got into a real mess. When I
changed to CTool, all the complexities disappeared and I could spend
my time concentrating on deciding what I wanted to do instead of how to
do it.

However, CTool is still showing its C roots. Too much of the internal
workings of the data structure are exposed. This makes it very
difficult to change any detail of the implementation.

For example, suppose I had needed a fast insertBefore method. This
would have required updating the Statement data structure to be
doubly linked. Since the next pointers are exposed, I'd have no control
over what external code is using them to manipulate the data structure.
If the manipulation did not take into account the new pointers I would
have needed to add, then the result would have been a complete mess.

Hiding all the implementation details will allow future changes to
the internal workings. At the moment you don't even have to change
the implementation, just hide all the variables and work out what
actions are needed on the objects.

Hiding the variables, however, will break any existing program that
relies on the current implementation. It would have to be reserved
for the next major version.

Do you have a good idea what sort of tools people are building with
CTool amd hence what manipulation options they need?

	- Steven
-- 



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