[Swift-devel] a different way to do array/structure accesses

[Mihael Hategan]

Probably not very efficient, for more than one reason. Also less clear.
I'd vote against it.

On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 02:16 +0530, Ben Clifford wrote:
> I've been playing round with converting the .xml intermediate format to 
> be more strictly XML and less a mixture of XML and various other syntaxes.
> 
> One thing that comes out of this is that its simpler in the parser and 
> compiler layer to generate array and structure accesses using a bunch of 
> karajan level calls, like this:
> 
>   <print>
>     <parallel>
>       <getfield path="a"><vdl:getfield var="{foo}" /></getfield>
>     </parallel>
>   </print>
> 
> and
> 
>   <vdl:setfieldvalue>
>     <argument name="var">
>       <getfield path="a"><vdl:getfield var="{foo}" /></getfield>
>     </argument>
>     <argument name="value">
>       <number>9091</number>
>     </argument>
>   </vdl:setfieldvalue>
> 
> 
> instead of the way its done at the moment with a path syntax, like this:
> 
>   <vdl:setfieldvalue path="a" var="{foo}" value="9091"/>
> 
> and
> 
>   <print>
>     <parallel>
>       <vdl:getfield var="{foo}" path="a"/>
>     </parallel>
>   </print>
> 
> 
> This allows a bunch of simplification to happen with path handling in the 
> swift code. However, it makes the Karajan intermediate code more 
> complicated. From the language side of things, I'd like to make this 
> change, but I don't know enough about how that effects the load on 
> Karajan, especially with the insanely large source files that people are 
> machine-generating.
> 
> 
> (here's the program I pulled these from:
> 
> type mytype { int a; int b; }
> 
> mytype foo;
> 
> foo.a=9091;
> 
> foo.b=818;
> 
> print(foo.a);
> 
> )
> 
> -- 
> 
>