On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 9:50 PM, OvermindDL1 <overminddl1@gmail.com> wrote:
One area that scalpel could conceivably find a niche, depending on how you do it, would be in analyzing source code without seeing the full translation unit (as you might for syntax-coloring purposes). Since CLANG is really built to be a compiler, I don't think it can do that.
Of course I realize you can't always get a correct analysis if you don't see the whole TU, but especially if you're willing to do nondeterministic parsing/backtracking, you could very easily do a really good job.
I do not think it can do that either, without seeing the whole translation unit then you are going to see a *LOT* of undefined symbols, no clue if they are a type, function, etc... etc....
By exploring all possible valid parses you can usually deduce the role of a symbol from all the contexts in which it is used. Humans do it all the time.
It is impossible to have any kind of decent syntax-coloring without that (see the difference between the fully parsed and complete Visual Assist VS add-in compared to emacs/vi/VS/etc...), and refactoring becomes all but impossible.
emacs, vi, and VS only make local decisions about each symbol. You ought to be able to do much better by taking in an entire file and throwing out the possibilities that result in invalid parses. I know this approach works for natural language, which is full of the same kinds of ambiguities (homonyms/homophones). Actually the NLP case is much harder because a word doesn't have to be used consistently across sentences. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com