Expression Attributes

[Hoan Nguyen]

Hi Andrew,

I am sorry for delay in response.

My answers to your questions are inlined below.

 

Hello,
How are you? My name is Andrew and I am currently working on a project using the Boa language.

Part of my project involves retrieving the actual string of source code a statement or expression appears in, and I was wondering if you could clarify some things for me.

 

I’m a little confused by the attributes annotation, anon_declaration, expressions and generic_parameters within the Expression type. Could you please explain what is being kept in those attributes?

annotation stores the annotation or modifier (if any) of the expression.

anon_declaration stores the anonymous class declaration of a class instance creation

http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.isv%2Freference%2Fapi%2Forg%2Feclipse%2Fjdt%2Fcore%2Fdom%2FClassInstanceCreation.html

expressions stores all children expressions of an expression, for example left and right hand side expressions of an infix expression, i.e. a and b in a + b.

generic_parameters stores the list of type arguments (if any) of the expression, for example new <T> C () { ... }

 

Alternatively, is there any way to retrieve the source code of a statement or expression node?

Yes, you can traverse a Boa abstract syntax tree of an expression or a statement to pretty-print it. You might need to look at how Boa ASTs are created here

https://github.com/boalang/compiler/blob/master/src/java/boa/datagen/util/Java7Visitor.java

to do that.

 

Thank you very much in advance, and also thank you for developing the Boa mining tool!
-Andrew Lin