[Moose-dev] Re: ast-semantic

Of course, you can simply write aVariableNode name = 'self' and then you know that your variable is called 'self', but nothing more. I am not saying that this is wrong, it is likely to be correct in most cases and probably enough for most code analysis scenarios. IMHO, it should then also written like that to reveal its intention. The Pharo compiler does not compile code with instance/temporary/argument variables that shadow 'self', 'super', 'thisContext', 'true', 'false', or 'nil' (Jorge fixed that). However other compilers might not insist on that, or you might end up with syntactically correct code that never went through a semantic checker. For example, the following code is syntactically perfectly valid Smalltalk: foo: self | thisContext | super := self Also there is an infinite number of ways variables can be shadowed without going through the compiler and without anybody complaining. And there are not even 'dirty' tricks needed to do that, just add/remove instance-, class-, or global variables in the context of existing code. In this situation anything simpler than AST-Semantic most certainly leads to wrong results. Again, I am not saying that you have to use AST-Semantic. It is a tool that is useful if you need precise semantic information, for example for code transformations (Helvetia), a compiler (maybe the New Compiler in the future), or for semantic preserving refactorings (maybe the Refactoring Engine in the future). Lukas -- Lukas Renggli www.lukas-renggli.ch