The AST Typing Problem

• TOGVM-Spec

  2 0 4.4 PHP

  Specification and test cases for TOGVM

Make each AST node an RDF node and then you can cram whatever information into it you want. That's the approach I've been taking with https://github.com/TOGoS/TOGVM-Spec/, anyway.

Of course, for conveniently and safely manipulating in memory in $programming_language, you're probably going to want to define some structs/ADTs/whatever that only contain the data a given compilation stage is actively working with.

I've been thinking that what I need is a system that allows me to quickly define different lower-level datatypes for representing different views of the conceptual types and automate, to some degree, translation between them, so then each part of the system can work with objects designed specifically to be processed by it with minimal fuss.

A technical reason for avoiding those specialized types might be that the computer then has to spend more time transforming from one schema to the next. I would think that in practice this isn't any worse than having to do a lot of null checks.

A more human reason is that it could bean a combinatorical explosion of AST types. I guess this is where my idea about lightweight variations comes in.

In TypeScript this kind of thing might not be so bad, since any object can be downcast with no cost to a type that contains a subset of the information, and variations on types can be easily defined without even necessarily being named, e.g. `ASTNode & HasResultType & HasSourceLocation`.

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