Translator – Assignments (Development)

The last several days was spent implementing the new design for handling assignments. The assignment operators are no longer handled by the operator routines, and now by the comma and equal token handlers and the assign command handler (which previously didn't do anything). Two support functions were also implemented, one to put the appropriate assignment command on the command stack based on the first (perhaps only) item being assigned, and the other to check each assignment item for the correct data type (allowing for mixed string and sub-strings).

At the end of the statement, the value (expression) being assigned is checked for the correct type in the assign command handler, adding a hidden conversion as needed for the numeric data types. Because the assignment operators are no longer handled as binary operators, the table entries for the assignment operators were modified where each only has one operand (for the value being assigned).

Also, tokens with parentheses being assigned can be assumed to be arrays since a function with arguments cannot be assigned (only the function name alone, without parentheses, can be assigned). Therefore, unlike tokens with parentheses in expressions that can be either an array or a function call, the values in parentheses of an array being assigned can be assumed to be subscripts, which must be integers (or doubles with conversion). If it turns out that the name is not an array when encoded, the Encoder will report the error.

Several other data type reporting error issue were also corrected but without adding any special expression type handling as was planned in the failed design concept. A new concept was developed, which probably won't require the Translator to keep track of the expression type while translating. More details to follow...