[parenscript-devel] A class of bugs in PS: expressions not parenthesized when necessary

[Travis Cross]

I had a couple of fixes sitting in my repository that addressed some of 
these issues.  I've since pushed them up.

Daniel Gackle wrote:
> The following bug in PS broke my code today:
> 
>   (ps (aref (if (and x (> (length x) 0))
>               (aref x 0)
>               y)
>               z))
>   => "x && x.length > 0 ? x[0] : y[z];"

This now returns:

(x && x.length > 0 ? x[0] : y)[z];

> You can see a similar bug here:
> 
>   (ps (aref (or (slot-value x 'y)
>               (slot-value a 'b))
>               z))
>   => "x.y || a.b[z];"

This now returns:

(x.y || a.b)[z];

> and here again:
> 
>   (ps (- (if x y z)))
>   => "-x ? y : z;"

The changes I pushed didn't help that one.  As I recall, that's actually 
why I hadn't pushed them yet, because I wanted to look into the overall 
precedence issue more thoroughly (but then of course, life refocused my 
attention elsewhere).

> Clearly, there's a problem with not parenthesizing things.
> 
> Since the last patch or two I've sent have been ignored, I won't send a 
> new one here, but rather ask: is PS being actively maintained or not? 
> This project is too valuable to let fade.

Vladimir may be working on integrating your patches here and making 
other changes in this area, so I won't step on his toes if that's the 
case, except to push the fixes I'd already made.

Thanks for your continued interest in the project.  You're quite right 
that ParenScript is an important library that deserves better than the 
off and on interest many of us can devote to it.

Long term I think the project should be able to take a more systematic 
approach to supporting the ECMAScript standards.  I think we can also 
move towards doing more parse tree analysis in the compile step rather 
than the simple translations we currently perform.  I'd like to 
implement such features as termination analysis to get rid of the need 
for those ugly (return) statements, and perhaps add a way to unfold or 
trampoline tail recursions.

Cheers,

-- Travis