Greetings.
This email will probably contain some dumb questions buried in a jumble
of context, but I'm potentially looking at patching Flex to fix this
problem and would like to exhaust all /other/ possibilities before I do
so. The project I am working on has already snowballed into an
avalanche, so additional complexity is something I would like to avoid.
I'm involved in a rather complicated modding project, where, due to
licensing restrictions, we are patching commercially-licensed but
undistributable code[1] by using the usual diff method, and then using
Flex's generated AST to find particular sequences of statements in
parsed code. We then patch them appropriately, and then emit the patched
ActionScript using a custom Evaluator. The evaluator in question is
based on PrettyPrinter, but is ending up being quite more exhaustive in
order to present compilable code. We use this tool to collect
information and patch repetitive statements that can be parsed with
tools like regular expressions, but need thousands of lines of
supporting code to properly keep track of context and syntax.
The problem I'm running into is that I'm having to run the Parser with
`Context.scriptAssistParsing` turned on, as I need the AST with as few
mutations as possible, and without loading includes or imports.
Unfortunately, this has resulted into running into a problem with
ForStatementNodes in this mode.
It appears that, while `for each` statements are parsed, there is no
indication applied in NodeFactory to the ForStatementNode to indicate
that the Node is a `for each` loop /in scriptAssistParsing mode/. In
addition, if I were to turn scriptAssistParsing off, there would be
significant mutations applied. In NodeFactory.java, it appears like
there were plans made to introduce a boolean (is_each?) to mark this,
but it never materialized.
Is there another way to determine this information, or will I need to
patch Flex itself to expose it? If this is something that should be
added to the upstream project, what would be the most agreeable means to
implement it? Right now, I simply plan on adding a public boolean
is_each to ForStatementNode, and updating NodeFactory accordingly.
Thanks in advance,
Lance Johnson
1: The owners of the code in question have released it on GitHub, but
the license terms forbid distribution of modified code or binaries, so
we distribute our mod as patches, instead. There's also talk of more
permissive licensing in the future. Maybe.
