treecc

Tom Tromey's blog brought me to treecc, which I found interesting, and so I'm writing AST in it. It's precompiler, or code generator, similar in nature to venerable lex/yacc combo. Treecc allows you to create abstract data types and bind them into singly-inheritant hierarchy. With the hierarchy in place, you can define the methods that operate on those abstract types, and treecc will do with those methods what's effectively multiple dispatch. That's quite cool, and makes it possible to do very concisely and clearly what you'd otherwise have to encode in complex switch-case entanglements. There's more, e.g. it lets you query each object for its abstract type. I'm yet to explore it fully, but I might end up writing most of my hand-rolled OO-like stuff in this very thing.

In other news, I did some planning, opened a few milestones, and filed a bunch of feature requests that the milestones should resolve to be completed. It's a pile of raw notes ATM, some of them might end up reverted, and more are certain to come.