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Re: AST serialization
Etienne M. Gagnon writes:
> > Haven't thought much about this, but you might want to consider
> > implementing Comparable and Cloneable as well, if not already.
>
> I see some problems here:
>
> (1) Comparable: This one requires ordering of compared objects. How do
> you "order" different AST nodes? If you want to use, let say, the depth
> first ordering, then comparing two nodes might get complicated, and O(N)
> in the worst case, where N is the size of the AST. Ugh!
>
> (2) Cloneable: Because a SableCC AST node cannot have to distinct
> parents, this would mean that you want a "deep" cloning. This is not
> supported by the Comparable interface, which goal is to declare that
> "shallow copying" is safe. The alternative is to override clone(), but
> is this really a needed feature? Might be!?
I think those are valid points.. it's not worth doing unless
there is a 'natural' meaning for it... so nevermind that idea :-)
-Archie
___________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs * Whistle Communications, Inc. * http://www.whistle.com