Translator – String Processing (Change)

The planned changes for operator and internal functions where their operands (arguments) will no longer be kept on the done stack conflicts with the way strings are handled.

If an operator or internal function has string operands, all the operands are attached to the operator or internal function. This is necessary for string operands because the Translator has insufficient information to determine if generic string tokens (with and without a parentheses) are  temporary or not. Temporary strings need different codes at run-time because the temporary strings are deleted when no longer needed. The Encoder will determine if these tokens refer to variables and arrays (not temporary) or functions (temporary).

As mentioned, all operands are attached, which is unnecessary because only the string operands are actually needed. Further, the Translator can determine if some strings are temporary, like the result of the concatenate operator and most of the internal functions that return a string. The sub-string functions only return a temporary string if their argument is a temporary string.

To resolve this conflict between saving the string operands and the new operand processing, if a string operand (or argument) cannot be determined to be a temporary string, it will be left on the done stack. When the operator or internal function is appended to the output, it's specific code for the data type has already been determined. If the code has one or more string data type operands (not temporary string operands), the string operands will be counted to determine how many strings were left on the done stack. These strings will be popped and attached to the operator or internal function token.