Hyphenated keywords and switch expressions

[Alex Buckley]

Hi Tagir,

On 1/13/2019 2:53 AM, Tagir Valeev wrote:
> Ah, ok, we moved away slightly from the spec draft [1]. I was not
> aware, because I haven't wrote parser by myself. The draft says:
>
> SwitchLabeledRule:
>    SwitchLabeledExpression
>    SwitchLabeledBlock
>    SwitchLabeledThrowStatement
>
> SwitchLabeledExpression:
>    SwitchLabel -> Expression ;
> SwitchLabeledBlock:
>    SwitchLabel -> Block ;
> SwitchLabeledThrowStatement:
>    SwitchLabel -> ThrowStatement ;
>
> Instead we implement it like:
>
> SwitchLabeledRule:
>    SwitchLabel -> SwitchLabeledRuleStatement
> SwitchLabeledRuleStatement:
>    ExpressionStatement
>    Block
>    ThrowStatement
>
> So we assume that the right part of SwitchLabeledRule is always a
> statement and reused ExpressionStatement to express Expression plus
> semicolon, because syntactically it looks the same.

That's an odd assumption, because SwitchLabeledRule appears in the 
SwitchBlock of a SwitchExpression, and we obviously intend any kind of 
expression to be allowed after the -> in a switch expression. That is, 
in a switch expression, what comes after the -> is not just an 
expression statement (x=y, ++x, --x, x++, x--, x.m(), new X()) but any 
expression (including this, X.class, x.f, x[i], x::m). Only in a switch 
statement do we restrict the kind of expression allowed after the -> but 
that's a semantic rule (14.11.2), not syntactic, in order to share the 
grammar between switch expressions and switch statements.

> Strictly following a spec draft here looks even more ugly, because it
> requires more object types in our code model and reduces the
> flexibility when we need to perform code transformation. E.g. if we
> want to wrap expression into block, currently we just need to replace
> an ExpressionStatement with a Block not touching a SwitchLabel at
> all. Had we mirrored the spec in our code model, we would need to
> replace SwitchLabeledExpression with SwitchLabeledBlock which looks
> more annoying.

Understood. The grammar is specified like it is in order to introduce 
the critical terms "switch labeled expression", "switch labeled block", 
and "switch labeled throw statement". Aligning production names with 
critical terms is longstanding JLS style.

Alex