[SAOC 2023] dfmt rewrite - Weekly update #6

[Prajwal S N]

On Thursday, 2 November 2023 at 15:05:39 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

> Are there any plans on extending ASTBase?

At the moment, no. `ASTBase` was created to provide a mechanism 
to build a complete AST and traverse it without having to do any 
of the semantic analysis passes. Unfortunately, this means that 
the classes used to represent the nodes in `ASTBase` are 
different from the ones used in `ASTCodegen`. There are certain 
missing features which prevent us from using it for cases where 
we need access to the tokens present in a node (e.g. the name of 
an identifier, or the body of a function). Extending it for our 
use case would not help, since the formatter needs to be able to 
walk the AST and write the tokens in each node in order to obtain 
the original source code. Since the compiler uses `ASTCodegen`, 
the nodes provided by it contain the correct tokens, and also 
contain the methods required to meaningfully generate a string 
representation of those tokens.