Lucifers,
I recently discovered an old branch on my MacBook that I rebased and put on
GitHub:
https://github.com/nwellnhof/lucy-clownfish/tree/cfc_symbol
In this branch, I began to refactor or even eliminate the CFCSymbol class. The
original motivation came from thinking about how to reimplement the Clownfish
compiler as a Clownfish project itself.
The CFCSymbol struct in master looks like this:
struct CFCSymbol {
CFCBase base;
struct CFCParcel *parcel;
char *exposure;
char *class_name;
char *class_nickname;
char *micro_sym;
char *short_sym;
char *full_sym;
};
Some observations:
1. `micro_sym` is kind of a misnomer these days. It should simply be `name`.
2. `short_sym` and `full_sym` are cached values. They can be computed using
`name` and the class the symbol lives in. If this class is always passed as an
additional argument to the functions returning these values, `parcel` and
`class_nickname` become unnecessary, too.
3. `class_name` is used by classes to store the class name. But if you think
about it, classes should store the class name in the `name` (formerly
`micro_sym`) slot. `class_name` is also used by methods to keep track of the
class where they were defined first. But this is only needed for methods.
So a symbol is essentially just a name and an exposure specifier. This makes
it questionable whether CFCSymbol is useful as a base class at all. I lean
towards eliminating CFCSymbol completely.
Nick
