[antlr-interest] Operator overloading?

[Randall R Schulz]

Vladimir,

On Thursday 22 February 2007 14:02, Vladimir Gusev wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Is there a way to implement in my language operator overloading using
> ANTLR? I would appreciate any thoughts about this.

Operator overloading is really not a syntactic aspect of any given 
programming language (that I know of). It's more a matter of symbol 
table organization and semantic actions to verify that a fragment of 
code that is (purely) syntactically valid is actually grammatical or 
legal in the larger sense of the rules for valid programs of that 
language.

For example, in Java the methods in a (putative) method overload set 
must each be distinct from all others (in that overload set) without 
regard to their return types (i.e., their argument signatures must all 
be distinct). It would probably not make sense (or even be possible) to 
try to encode this rule syntactically.

Instead, the parser would just make sure the parentheses, argument 
type / argument name pairs, commas, etc. were lexically and 
syntactically valid. Then, once a syntactically correct class 
definition was parsed, a later pass of the compiler (or verifier or 
translator, etc.) would verify the aforementioned rule, along with all 
the other non-syntactic rules governing valid Java programs.


> Thanks.
>
> Vladimir


Randall Schulz