TAS Must Die, Chapter 22

Work is sucking the life out of me. Not much progress on this project.

I shifted gears a bit and installed jboss. Then I wrote a totally crappy servlet that compiles some test iscript file, executes it, and displays it to a browser. In short, I now have a stem-to-stern proof of concept.

I took a gander at some of our other iscript. I need to implement while loops and such. No big deal. The gotcha right now is part of the expression parsing.

In iscript, you can have some very similar looking stuff actually meaning very different things:

<!-- #set name=fred value="zoot" -->
<!-- #set name=bob value=x[fred] -->

Yes, iscript can't support a subroutine but by God it supports associate arrays. /rolleyes
This snippet would assign the value of x["zoot"] to bob.

Now, check this.

<!-- #set name=zoot value="zappa" -->
<!-- #set name=fred value="zoot" -->
<!-- #set name=bob value=[fred] -->

This assigns "zappa" to bob. Swell, huh? The syntax on that last line means, "get the value of fred ("zoot" in this case), and treat it like a variable name, and use its value (zappa)." So the presence of the variable to the left of the open bracket changes drastically the meaning of the construct. Nice.

This gets tricky for my operator precedence parser. The operator stack is of no help if I need to know if the previous token read was a variable. I may be reduced to checking the token stream and replacing open brackets that follow variables with a different, synthetic token. That is, if the token stream is

variable [ variable2 ]

then what the parser is given is

variable ndx variable2 ]

where ndx is an operator that gives the parser enough information to reduce correctly. Now '[ variable2 ]' looks nothing like 'ndx variable2 ]'

Another option which is especially nice is if iscript doesn't support anything fancier than 'variable [' for associative arrays, is for me to tokenize variable as an indexVariable. The it would probably be possible to reduce [ variable2 ] to an index if the topmost item on the variable stack is an indexVariable.

It's also possible to have indexes on the "name" portion of SET

<!-- #set name=x[bob] value=x[eddie] -->

Where if bob is 7, x[7] will receibe a new value. The brackets function differently yet again, however, in this case:

<!-- #set name=[x+7] value=3 -->

If x had the value of "pie" a new variable called 'pie7' would be created. Without the brackets the statement fails. I need to look into this more, however.

Also note that the expressions are pretty free-form. I am pretty sure this is valid:

<!-- #set name=[[x]+[y]] value=4 -->

so append the value of the value of y to the value of the value of x, and create a new variable with that result, and assign 4 to it.

I think this is likely the most dificult part of the syntax.

On deck:

1) Solve the bracket issues
2) Implement about a zillion test cases that show said work is reasonably correct
3) Implement the "include" executable. This is fundamental to any real test of our iscript. This will probably also make me reimplement my servlet in a more reasonable way.

Several hours of work there, easy.