Representing Concrete Syntax
We need a generic protocol for communicating and elaborating concrete syntax. This creates a problem. How specific should we be wrt the syntactic categories of Epigram? My inclination is not at all. We either need a generic technology which will adapt to arbitrary syntactic categories, or we need to flatten the syntactic categories. At the moment, I don’t feel like figuring out how to do the former. So I suggest we adopt some very general setup like this
type Concrete shed = (Mark, CTree shed)
data CTree shed
= CShed shed
| CNode Node [Concrete shed]
Remarks
- It’s polymorphic in the contents of sheds, but the elaborator is only ever sent Concrete ()
- The type Mark is some equality type which belongs to the UI: it is used to mark information coming back from the elaborator as concrete syntax is processed.
- The type Node represents both the terminal and nonterminal symbols, whatever they may be. Blah code will need to interrogate this type in arbitrary ways, so things might get a touch existential. As in
data Blah
= ...
| ∀α. Case (Node → Maybe α, [String]) (α → Blah) Blah
The function tests if the node suits the success continuation. If so, the strings name the subnodes and the success continuation executes; if not, the failure case runs. Of course, the whole thing suspends if we have a shed rather than a node.
Parsing to this representation requires that we can generate suitable elements of Mark (I suspect this may involve refs.) The real exciting stuff in the parser is more likely to involve figuring names out—more on that anon.
Printing. Hmm.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:50 pm
Can you tell me, please, when that protocol will be created and published, so I can use it to develop my editor further?
June 7th, 2005 at 8:46 am
Working on it at the moment, so hopefully soon. But if you’re looking for a specific date, I just don’t know. There are several other things I’m also supposed to be working on right now. Hopefully we’ll have the Node type nailed down some more today. It’s mostly a question of coding up the grammar, with a couple of slightly sticky points—I’m demanding that the elaborator retains complete ignorance of what identifiers are used to name variables, so scope must be resolved by a parsing phase. The elaborator will be prepared to divulge which variables are in scope at any shed, but it won’t help with their names, because it won’t know them!
June 7th, 2005 at 11:50 am
Further to this…maybe I’ll make a new entry.