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Language Implementation Patterns
book

Language Implementation Patterns

by Terence Parr
December 2009
Intermediate to advanced
380 pages
9h 2m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Language Implementation Patterns
Pattern 11Irregular Heterogeneous AST

Purpose

This pattern implements an abstract syntax tree (AST) using more than a single node data type and with an irregular child list representation.

Discussion

This pattern only differs from Pattern 10, Normalized Heterogeneous AST in the implementation of its child pointers. Instead of a uniform list of children, each node data type has specific (named) child fields. In this sense, the child pointers are irregular. In some cases, named fields lead to more readable code. For example, methods can refer to left and right instead of, say, children[0] and children[1].

When building trees from scratch, most programmers follow this pattern. It’s very natural to name the fields of a class, in this case naming ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781680500097Errata Page