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[RFC007] Improve/simplify record representation in the new AST #2102

Merged
merged 2 commits into from
Nov 22, 2024

Commits on Nov 21, 2024

  1. Improve record representation in the new AST

    Instead of elaborating piecewise definitions (such as `{foo.bar = 1,
    foo.baz = 2}`) directly at the parsing stage, this commit makes the new
    AST closer to the source language by making record a list of field
    definition, where the field "name" can be a sequence of identifiers and
    strings. This representation is used internally by the parser; we now
    make it the default in the AST, such that the migration of the parser
    won't have to do this elaboration at all. The elaboration is offloaded
    to the conversion to `RichTerm`, which happens in the `ast::compat`
    module.
    
    This makes the AST closer to the source language.
    
    The first motivation is that it'll be better for the LSP, where some
    open issues on the tracker are caused by the inability to trace what the
    LSP get back to the original piecewise definitions.
    
    The second reason is that we can't actually elaborate a piecewise
    definition while staying in the new AST correctly as of today: the new
    AST only has one record variant, which is recursive by default, but this
    doesn't match the way recursion and scoping work for piecewise
    definition. For example, `{foo.bar = 1, baz.foo = foo + 1}` works fine
    in today's Nickel (evaluate to `{foo = {bar = 1}, baz {foo = 2}}`), but
    if we elaborate it in the new AST naively, we'll get an infinite
    recursion: `{foo = {bar = 1}, baz = {foo = foo + 1}}`.
    
    Mailine Nickel currently uses a non recursive `Record` for that, but we
    don't want to introduce such "runtime dictionary" in the new AST as they
    can't be expressed in the source language. Instead, we rather keep
    record as defined piecewise and will do further elaboration when needed,
    during typechecking, future compilation, or in the meantime when
    converting the new AST representation to mainline Nickel.
    yannham committed Nov 21, 2024
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Commits on Nov 22, 2024

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