Re: [ANN] an EBNF parser and coding pattern tool (LGPL)

[Stephen Leake <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov>]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
> > That makes sense, assuming "Introspect" and "FieldTypes" are new C++
> > keywords. Are there any C++ compilers that actually do this? I don't
> > think it's in the current ISO C++ standard.
> 
> No, there aren't, which was the OP's point. I was describing an
> outline of how it could potentially be added to C++. If it was,
> Introspect (or something similar) could be made to look like a
> class template in namespace std, so no new keywords would be
> involved.

Ok, that makes sense.

> > Is there anything preventing the same techniques in Ada?
> 
> Ada doesn't have partial specialization of generics (that is,
> allowing completely different generic contents based on subsets
> of the parameters), so it can't do the recursive template stuff,
> at least as far as I know, given how poorly I know Ada.

Right, that makes sense as well.

> > How does this compare with an ASIS tool for Ada?
>  > Seems to me ASIS is a more straight-forward,
>  > and more flexible, approach.
> 
> I don't know enough about ASIS to say. Can an Ada program
> use ASIS in order to inspect itself? 

Not at run time; ASIS is a compile time tool.

> Can it apply ASIS within a generic to examine its generic
> parameters?

Yes, at compile time.

ASIS allows you to inspect a program that has been compiled. In this
case, you would use it to generate code to do the object tree walking.

In general, I suspect an ASIS approach would yeild a smaller run-time,
since you don't need run-time support for introspection. 

-- 
-- Stephe