Le 04/05/2018 à 21:13, Denis Kudriashov a écrit :
2018-05-04 21:10 GMT+03:00 Richard Sargent
<richard.sarg...@gemtalksystems.com
<mailto:richard.sarg...@gemtalksystems.com>>:
On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 1:04 PM, Denis Kudriashov
<dionisi...@gmail.com <mailto:dionisi...@gmail.com>> wrote:
2018-05-04 19:45 GMT+03:00 Sean P. DeNigris
<s...@clipperadams.com <mailto:s...@clipperadams.com>>:
Ramon Leon-5 wrote
> And my point made; I don't even know what that means.
Ha ha, I googled it and even after seeing the definition
still didn't
understand - we must be getting old ;-)
Regarding the use of acronyms - while I agree with you as a
general
principle, I wonder about this case. Since the argument IIUC
is that "a
general user won't know the domain well enough to understand
the acronym",
would they understand "abstractSyntaxTree"?!
Now I am wonder: is it really correct to call syntax tree as
abstract when it is really implemented?
AST is very known term but now when I read it word by word I
have such questions :).
In computer science, an*abstract syntax tree*(AST), or just *syntax
tree*, is a*tree*representation of the*abstract syntactic *structure
of source code written in a programming language.
[Wikipedia]
I know it. But my stupid question is why it's still called abstract
while it is implemented for concrete language?
This is to make the difference between the parse tree (or concrete
syntax tree) and the transformation of that parse tree into an abstract
syntax tree (where a bunch of syntax tree nodes created by the parsing
are removed or made absent... they are not needed to represent the code
structure). Hence the abstract: the abstract syntax tree is an
abstraction of the parse tree, even if it represent an exhaustive view
of a concrete piece of code.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs143/cs143.1128/lectures/02/Slides02.pdf,
slide 159 onward.
That, to me, is as opaque as
the acronym for one not acquainted with the domain, and may
buy us little at
the cost of a good amount of extra typing. Maybe keep the
acronym and add a
good method comment…
-----
Cheers,
Sean
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