[news.eclipse.technology.dltk] Re: Semantic checking - via validators?

[Andrei Sobolev <haiodo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chuck,

Nice to see, what DLTK help you.

We don't have something special in area of semantic analysis, etc.

Where is some ways to implement such features:
1) Using of ScriptBuilder.
In DLTK we have feature named ScriptBuilder. This is incremental resource builder, used for building Mixin models, etc.
It will give you list of changed resources, and you cold check all this files and set appropriate markers.
All Eclipse markers will be show in DLTK Text editors. ScriptBuilder will contain information about builded resources,
and will be executed on each resource operations, like "resource added", "resource content changed".

2) You could use Validator, Validators framework uses Script Builder for incremental execution of validators. One more
additional point, validators framework manages validator instances and allow unified way to sore configurations, etc.
Also user could turn on/off and execute validators from DLTK UI.

3) If you also plan to make semantic checks for file edited, you need to extend Reconciler from your
ScriptSourceViewerConfiguration class. Reconciler will rebuild model, and do checks, after user will make some changes
in code. By default it is 500 milliseconds delay, so reconciler will be executed only if user not type code 500
milliseconds.


References:
1) Extension point to implement: org.eclipse.dltk.core.builder
2) We have "package require" checker implemented for Tcl. (TclCheckBuilder class).
3) ScriptSourceViewerConfiguration.getReconciler()

Best regards,
Andrei Sobolev.


> Thanks to ANTLR and DLTK, I now have an advanced editor which can 
> immediately flag syntactic problems in our language source files.
> 
> My question is if/when/how should I find/flag semantic errors in the source 
> file?
> 
> 1.    Is there any part of DLTK framework which could/should be used to 
> invoke/perform semantic checks?    I assume the answer to this is no. I know 
> you support external validators - but we'd like the semantic checking to be 
> performed implicitly.
> 
> 2.    When should semantic checks be performed - whenever the parser is 
> invoked?
> 
> 3.    How should errors be reported - using the parser's error reporter?
>         Also, how can we determine the line number for populating IProblem 
> in the file if that information is:
>         a) not available in DLTKToken
>         b) not kept in ASTNode
> 
> Thanks,
> Chuck
> 
>