Anything new?

Sorry for the late update, college is really getting started so I have to get used to going to lectures and meetings again. But my php-*-projects are still going strong. The evaluation strategy can handle construction of, assigning to and reading entries from arrays now. An array in the interpreter is modeled as a map which maps keys to values. Some useful strategies have been implemented to easily add and retrieve values from the arrays. The documentation about arrays tells us that PHP also sees an array as a map, so the implementation of the semantics was not that hard. The only thing that it does not support (yet) is references. These will be added later.

The second thing that has been added is the fix for the long lasting psat-2 bug-entry. This states that HereDoc should be parsed as a sequence of literals and escapes, just like double-quoted strings. This turns out to be very tricky. Double-quoted strings have a very straight-forward start and end-point, HereDoc does not have this. The end of a HereDoc is marked with a newline-label-newline sequence. So the newline was added as an escape in a literal, we have to treat this newline in a special way if it is followed by a label. The problem that arises here is that we cannot express this within SDF. This should be written down as a follow-restriction on the newline, but then we would have to know the length of the label. This length is not fixed, so we can not do this. By not setting the follow restriction a literal became ambiguous when there was a variable in front of it. The solution here was to write out the definition of 'a list of literals or escapes'. This definition was extended by 'where there are no two literals in a row'. This solved all the problems for that moment and everybody was happy!
This happiness lasted until I tried to parse a file with a statement after the HereDoc, this failed. So a statement after a HereDoc caused the parser to keep parsing until the end of the file, something that we definitely do not want. So the problem here was that the end of a HereDoc was not strict enough. I tried several things, but nothing seemed to work. The optional semicolon was causing big problems. It turns out that this optional semicolon was a misinterpretation of the documentation. The documentation mentions this semicolon and I thought that it was part of the end of the HereDoc. But this semicolon is only allowed because the HereDoc is probably part of a bigger expression that needs to be closed by the semicolon. So I simplified the HereDoc-end and this allowed a nice follow-restriction. All the problems are over and everybody is happy again :)
So there is now a more expressive support for HereDoc, with a restriction. This was already true with the first implementation, but never really mentioned. The problem is that one can not express the fact that the labels of the HereDoc should match within SDF. So HereDoc is parsed from the first open label until the last closing label, even if there are statements in between. This restriction is unfortunate, but reality for all parsers that are based on SDF. It is simply not possible to solve this within the syntax definition. It can be solved by adding a post-processing step, so an issue for this is already created.

The finish this entry with some good news, there are windows-builds for both php-front and php-sat! It took us some time and some hackery implementation of stratego-routines to get everything right, but we succeeded. The hackery stuff will be moved to the stratego libraries as soon as possible. I have tested the build on my own machine and it seems to work fine. Please try it out if you have a windows machine that you can (ab)use. Windows-builds for stratego programs are relatively new, so there could be some hidden problems.