[antlr-interest] Operator overloading?

[Andy Tripp]

Vladimir Gusev wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Is there a way to implement in my language operator overloading using ANTLR?
> I would appreciate any thoughts about this.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Vladimir
>   
Yes, I think this could be done. I replace C++ operator overloading with 
Java
function calls as part of my C++ to Java translator (jazillian.com), 
which is a little different but related.
Say you're creating a binary "+" operator between two Money objects like 
this. You'd
parse the source files into ASTs, search the ASTs for binary "+" 
operators, and then
figure out the types of the left and right ASTs. If they're both type 
Money, then this
is the thing you're looking for, and you could replace the "+" node in 
the AST
by something else, such as some METHOD_CALL type of node.

Print out your modified AST, and you've just used ANTLR as a preprocessor
to convert operator overloading to code without operator overloading. In 
that way,
your "money1 + money2" expressions would become "money1.plus(money2)".

Andy