Re: [Opencxx-users] opencxx refactoring

[<se...@in...>]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 02:10, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> hi there,
> 
> as I have been getting into the opencxx internals over the last weeks,
> I'v started to refactor / redesign the code. Here are some thoughts
> about this efford.
> 
> I renamed some classes to make their goal clearer, and I changed the
> method names to be more consistent with the rest of synopsis' naming
> conventions. Anyways, here is the meat:

[...]

> That's about where I am right now. The PTree namespace looks quite clean
> already. One issue I'm not quite satisfied with is the design of Encoding
> and TypeInfo (and Environment, just to name all classes that touch this
> design): I'd like to get back to this in the not-so-far future.
> Next comes the 'Environment' class. As I said in my last mail, that looks
> a bit monolithic, i.e. instead of putting specific cases into subclasses
> (class scope with lookup in base classes, to name one example), it's all
> contained in this single class.
> 
> Once these points are addressed, I believe it would be a good time to
> start thinking about the Parser and how the symbol lookup could be
> integrated right into the parse stage (instead of doing a second pass
> over the ptree via ClassWalker).
> 
> What do you think about these changes ? Whether we decide to work on the
> parser or keep it as it is,

Templates make a C++ parser at least 'x' times harder.
Can you explain how we can handle template specialization with current
parser.

What I understand,
- specializing templates requires that the tokens for a template
  declaration be saved so that the template can be reprocessed when the
  actual template arguments are specified.
- it requires the syntax phase to perform near-complete type, scope, and
  expression analysis, including function overloading.

Present design predate such change to the language.
In my vocabulary, present design is "C-Front style".

So my believed is that we need to rejuvenate the design.
But my question is how.

> I believe the changes I have applied already provide an important
> cleanup of the design, and thus make it much more easy to maintain
> and extend the existing functionality.