Hi,
wanting to obtain gcc's parse tree I found the -fdump-tree option.
Specifically the -fdump-tree-original-raw output contains all of the
information I need. When I tried to write a parser for the tree dump I
noticed, however that the output might contain ambiguities which can't be
resolved and render parsing the output correctly impossible.
For example, if your code contains a string constant with a colon you might
get into trouble:
warning("wrong type: foobar");
This code will make -fdump-tree-original-raw produce something like this:
@54 string_cst type: @61 strg: wrong type: foobar lngt: 19
Now try to make your parser extract the correct type.
Similar problem occur when a string constant contains "\n" or even "\0". The
former will produce a linebreak in the output making it hard if not
impossible to parse. The latter will produce output where the string
constant is truncated after the \0 character event though the "lngt"
property specifies the length of the whole, non-truncated string.
So to resolve that problem I took the gcc 4.0.1 source code and patched
tree.h and tree-dump.c. The patched version introduces two new options for
-fdump-tree: The "parseable" option which produces unambiguous and easier to
parse but otherwise similar output to "raw" and the "maskstringcst" option
which produces output with the string constants masked since this makes
parsing the output even easier and I'm not interested in the string
constants.
My question is: Does anybody think that these new features are of any use to
someone else but me and does anybody want to have a look at my patches and
maybe merge them with the official gcc sources?
Hans-Christian
