Also known as metavariables or template parameters.
This is a bit of a tortured excursion, trying to figure out how I want to
best represent this. I have a number of pages of hand-written notes that
I'd like to distill over time, but the rendered graph ontology (via
`asg-ontviz`) demonstrates the broad idea.
`AirTpl::TplApply` highlights some remaining questions. What I had _wanted_
to do is to separate the concepts of application and expansion, and support
partial application and such. But it's going to be too much work for now,
when it isn't needed---partial application can be worked around by simply
creating new templates and duplicating params, as we do today, although that
sucks and is a maintenance issue. But I'd rather address that head-on in
the future.
So it's looking like Option B is going to be the approach for now, with
templates being closed (as in, no free metavariables) and expanded at the
same time. This simplifies the parser and error conditions significantly
and makes it easier to utilize anonymous templates, since it'll still be the
active context.
My intent is to get at least the graph construction sorted out---not the
actual expansion and binding yet---enough that I can use templates to
represent parts of NIR that do not have proper graph representations or
desugaring yet, so that I can spit them back out again in the `xmli` file
and incrementally handle them. That was an option I had considered some
months ago, but didn't want to entertain it at the time because I wasn't
sure what doing so would look like; while it was an attractive approach
since it pushes existing primitives into the template system (something I've
wanted to do for years), I didn't want to potentially tank performance or
compromise the design for it after I had spent so much effort on all of this
so far.
But my efforts have yielded a system that significantly exceeds my initial
performance expectations, with a decent abstractions, and so this seems
viable.
DEV-13708
See the Air docblock for more information. I'm introducing new tokens for
the template system, which uses the terms "free" and "closed". I prefer
open/close for delimiters, as I've expressed elsewhere, but unfortunately it
conflicts too much (and too confusingly) with other standard terminology as
we get more into the formal side of the language.
DEV-13708
This removes special cases, but it does complicate the parent `AirAggregate`
parser. A pattern of delegation is forming, though abstracting it may be an
interesting challenge, given Rust's limitation on macro invocations as match
arms. But, I think I can manage by generating the entire match using a
macro with a match-compatible syntax, augmenting where
needed...maybe. This'll be messy.
...but if I can write the nightmare that is `ele_parse!`, I'm sure I can
manage this. I just prefer to avoid complex macros unless I really need
them.
DEV-13708
And finally we have tokens aggregated onto the ASG in the context of a
template. I expected to arrive here much more quickly, but there was a lot
of necessary refactoring. There's a lot more that could be done, but I need
to continue; I had wanted this done a week ago.
It is worth noting, though, that this finally achieves something I had been
wondering about since the inception of this project---how I'd represent
templates on the graph. I think this worked out rather nicely. It wasn't
even until a few months ago that I decided to use AIR instead of NIR for
that purpose (NIR wouldn't have worked).
And note how I didn't have to touch the program derivation at all---the
system test just works with the AIR change, because of the consistent
construction of the graph. Beautiful.
DEV-13708
This sets us up to be able to determine how `Dangling` expressions will be
rooted into templates.
This new strategy isn't yet handling `Dangling`; I wanted to get this
committed first so that the `Dangling` refactoring is more clear.
DEV-13708
Expressions were previously tied to packages. This prepares for using a
`Tpl` as a container for expressions.
This does not yet handle the situation of auto-rooting dangling expressions
within the container.
DEV-13708
Mike Gerwitz