Re: Pointers to "why C behaves like that ?"

On 24 Nov 2002 18:33:29 -0500, thp@cs.ucr.edu wrote:
>Dr A. N. Walker <anw@merlot.uucp> wrote:
>+ Charles Bryant <r368714668.ch@chch.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>+><thp@cs.ucr.edu> wrote:
>It should be possible, once a program has been parsed into an abstract
>syntax tree, to present various annotated views of that database,
>regardless of how the original programmer specified the program:
> - adding Hungarian prefixes,
> - adding types etc for implicitly declared variables,
> - displaying keywords in distinctive colors or fonts,
> - adding helpful comments, e.g., "increment(/*changes*/ n)"
> - and so forth.
>I assume that some static analysis tools might already provide
>such services. If so, then some of the arguments against implicity
>typing evaporate.


  It seems that having a way to ask compiler for an AST would benefit
  a lot of people, trying to do something like you've mentioned. The
  question, however is -- where can one get such a tool for languages
  like C and C++.


  Once I had this idea of writing gcc backend that will just emit AST
  in some form, but, unfortunately GCC presents backend with a quite
  distilled version of the AST so to speak, so there is a lot of information
  ( especially for C++ ) lost.


  Have any of you heard of a free tool that can do it ?


Thanks,
Roman.

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