Dumping Parser Data
lazarus / 64-FPC development

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charles · 2023-12-23 15:11

I'm looking to automate analysis of some pascal programs, and step 1
is obtaining some structured representation of the programs. Looking
through the compiler manual, it doesn't seem like there's already a
way to dump AST information from the compiler - it almost looks like
the compiler doesn't use syntax trees at all (after my cursory dig
through the source). I'm sure I'm missing something though; are there
any places I should start looking for adding in an AST dump flag to
the compiler?

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Jonas Maebe · 2023-12-23 15:55

The -vp command line option dumps the node tree in a file called
tree.log

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charles · 2023-12-23 16:18

That seems very promising! A few simple programs I've given it work
well, I'll have to do some work to interpret the output but I can see
where most of the data is represented.

One question though - when compiling a simple "Hello World" program:
Code: Pascal  [Select][+][-]window.onload = function(){var x1 =
document.getElementById("main_content_section"); if (x1) { var x =
document.getElementsByClassName("geshi");for (var i = 0; i program
HelloWorld; begin    writeln('Hello World!')end. no string constants
are included in the log file. However, something like Code: Pascal
 [Select][+][-]window.onload = function(){var x1 =
document.getElementById("main_content_section"); if (x1) { var x =
document.getElementsByClassName("geshi");for (var i = 0; i x := 5 does
include the int constant in the log file. Are strings lost after
parsing or is there another way I can retrieve them?