Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Stephen Leake]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> In this particular case, the "annotated syntax tree" question in
> particular is mostly uninteresting since we are talking about
> characterizing identifiers.  It is "mostly" uninteresting since the
> resolution of an identifier depends on scopes, so the basic question
> that likely needs solving is "given the following source location and
> the following identifier, what data structures and definitions does it
> refer to".  Resolving identifiers based on source location efficiently
> will require suitable data structures, and any daemon answering
> questions accordingly will have to get raw data for building them.
>
> Accessing that raw data and preparing a dump suitable for turning into a
> data structure for such a daemon would seem like an obvious case for a
> GCC plugin.  So we are getting more at something like "source location
> dependent data structure dump" here.

That is what 'gcc -fdump-xref' does now.

AdaCore provides a tool 'gnatinspect' that reads that data and answers
queries about it: http://libre.adacore.com/, gnatcoll package.

Emacs Ada mode 5.0.1 (in Gnu ELPA) has experimental code to start
gnatinspect in a process and feed it queries, for Ada, C, C++.

-- 
-- Stephe