String Data Type

It now time in the Translator development that consideration needs to be given to how the program will be executed at run-time, which will determine what the Translator needs to do - and this applies to strings. Keeping in mind that the goal is to do as much work and decision making during translation so that it does not have to be done at run-time, which will aid in fast execution.

During execution, operands are pushed onto the evaluation stack, popped off by operators and functions, evaluated and the result pushed back onto the stack. Each evaluation stack element can hold a double or an integer. Strings are a little more involved. Strings are variable length and can be quite large, therefore a stack element cannot hold a string (or the stack would be very large).

C++, the underlying language, does not have a string type. Strings are handled as character arrays. These arrays need to be allocated for the appropriate size as needed and deallocated when no longer needed. A stack element will be a union of the different types that can be pushed onto the stack (double, integer, reference, etc.). For a string, the item in the union will be the previously implemented String class, which contains the length and pointer to the string's character array. Next, the difference between a reference strings and temporary strings...