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Yeah I only came to know about AST around a year back. I guess I am not just that competent but I can not imagine someone trying to make sense of a codebase usi
by eklavya 12y ago
Yeah I only came to know about AST around a year back. I guess I am not just that competent but I can not imagine someone trying to make sense of a codebase using ASTs. Mostly it's read the code/modify the code/debug the code for me.
I have written some Scheme and I still can't say I need to screw around with ASTs. May be I will be enlightened some day?
A UML diagram for this level of hugeness would be a really useful thing according to me, much much better than an AST.
- klibertp 12y agoI probably overreacted, sorry for this - working on programming languages and programming tools is not what most of programmers do (obviously) and that's the only domain where you need to know about what you can use AST for. As for this: > A UML diagram for this level of hugeness would be a really useful thing we actually agree 100% here. What I mean is that having AST is meaningless by itself, but you need AST if you want to generate UML diagram from the code. Or generate a callgraph. Or find similarities or duplication in the code. Or indeed perform any kind of automatic code transformation. So extracting AST is a first step to developing your own tools for working with a codebase. And with a codebase of this size you just have to write your own tools, adapted to the nature of this particular codebase. So while "trying to make sense using ASTs" really is a bit hard to imagine, trying to make sense of a codebase using all the tools AST enables you to write is what I had in mind.