Compiling Java 9

[Stephan Herrmann]

On 11/16/2016 11:35 PM, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>
>
> On 11/16/2016 02:26 PM, Stephan Herrmann wrote:
>> Still no good news for tools wishing to process just a fragment of the text.
>>
>
> Just how small a fragment, and in how unknown a context are you worried about?    Yes, if you're wanting to locally analyse the
> character string "module" in isolation, then yes, you cannot say whether it is a keyword or an identifier, but if you know you're in
> a ModuleBody, then "exports to to exports;" can be processed just fine.


For syntax highlighting: processing just one line of text would be great.
And the line break could be in the middle of an exports clause.

For error recovery: let's say, s.o. just forgot a ';', we'd like to
search for the next keyword to get back on track parsing.
So even if we started from the top of the file, we don't have the
context for sure, because we don't know where the syntax error happened.
I guess in that case reverting to always seeing restricted keywords as
keywords will give the best heuristics ... but it looks messy to me.

Different tools / tool features have different requirements, a full IDE
will have tens if not hundreds of different use cases in this regard.
Mind you: during editing text with syntax errors is the norm, not the
exception.

Stephan