RuleMethod describes the methods defined directly in the body of the rule. Such methods can obtain information about the rule they defined in and also about its subrules. The methods can call for the other methods defined in the same rule as well as in other rules. In addition, the computation result of such methods can be cached directly in AST (created for the rules).
RuleMethod can manipulate subrule names to receive information about them and to call for their methods.
If RuleMethod is declared in ExtensionRule, a virtual method alike is created (in OOP terms). If this method doesn’t have a body it will be automatically considered abstract, if it does then it will be considered virtual.
Virtual methods may (and abstract methods must) be redefined in the extensible rule extensions. This allows the author of the extensible rule to abstract the method from specified extensions, and lets the authors of the extensions create a method implementation specifically for their extensions.
When declaring an extension, the keyword override should be added. However, you should not specify the redefined method signature, as method overload is not supported.
RuleMethod allows you to perform any kind of calculations on the parsing result (AST). Using these calculations, you can carry out a multipass translation. Caching method results (marked with the Cached attribute) lets you split the processing into stages, since the values are saved directly in AST.
For example:
Here, Value returns the text, parsed by the IdentifierBody subrule of the Identifier rule, and the Parts method returns the list of the QualifiedIdentifier parts. QualifiedIdentifier consists of one or more identifiers divided by a period. The loop parsing result can be accessed through the Names field. Since this loop has a delimiter, its result is a two-element tuple.
The first tuple element contains an element list (their AST), the second – a list of delimiters (also their AST). The Names0 construct provides an access to the first tuple element. Next, the standard Map function (similar to Select from Linq) transforms the AST elements list into a string list. The value of each element is calculated by calling the Value method, described in the Identifier rule.
Sometimes the parsed code is incorrect. In this case, during the error recovery, the parser may create surrogate AST branches for missing values. Upon a call to the surrogate AST method, an exception is issued. To prevent that, you can declare a special method form – RuleMethodMissing. This form cannot have any parameters – all it can do is return some value by default. This value will be used in case of a missing value.
Virtual method example:
And its usage:
FirstChar is an embedded method. It returns the first character parsed by the rule passed as a parameter.
HexToChar and EscapeSequence are regular methods, described in the same project (in a separate Nemerle-module):
See also
Name
RuleMethodAttributes
RuleMethodsParam
Type
RuleMethodBody