Re: Re: Synopsis roadmap

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 00:07 -0500, Stefan Seefeld wrote:

Bonne annee, Stefan

> David Abrahams wrote:
> 
> >>Adding productions to accept the syntax is (almost) straight forward,
> >>but doing even the least bit of semantic analysis is not.
> > 
> > 
> > I don't think any semantic analysis is needed.  But maybe you're
> > calling some things semantic analysis that I am not?
> 
> [...]
> 
> > What does it mean to not "have" real partial template specialization
> > in a parser?  Or overload resolution, for that matter?  (Partial)
> > specialization support in a parser is just a matter of being able to
> > eat the syntax.  Overload resolution is a semantic analysis issue.
> > No?

Using synopsis in a documentation mode, the answer is yes.

> As I'm working my way through the boost headers (with the synopsis
> parser, of course), I'm reminded that I do need at least some type
> analysis: I need to be able to do non-dependent symbol lookup in the
> presence of template specializations.
> I haven't really looked into the topic yet, but I would expect it to
> be comparably complex to overload resolution, i.e. with the evaluation
> of multiple conversion paths etc.
> 
> Am I missing something here ? Or would you not call this 'semantic analysis' ?

Stefan, you seem to assume that the parser is only useful on validated
files.

I think that the parser do not require ambiguities to be resolved to
produce a valid ptree on either overload and template specialization.

That means, we must try to push the program analysis or validation has
far has we can from the ptree construction.

I see the produce ptree has a saved file
- that can be used as precompile headers,
- that can be used to produce what is necessary for documentation using
  java comments for example.
- that can be used for programs transformation.

Probably different levels of analysis are necessary depending of the
documentation required.  May be more advanced documentation can be
postponed.