Translator – Arrays and Functions (Design Issues)

The first issue is that the number of operands counter cannot be a simple variable because operands of arrays and functions can be other arrays and functions, so there needs to be a counter variable for each nested array or function. Therefore a counter stack is needed for multiple nested levels of arrays or functions. Using the existing List class for this simple counter stack would be overkill, so a new simple stack class will be developed with a similar interface (so it would be easy to switch from one to the other for stacks).

The second issue is when an array or function token is pushed on the stack. The Paren and DefFuncP token types do not have a table index and therefore a precedence can't be obtained from a table entry. To resolve this, a new precedence() function is needed in the Token class, which will work the same as the is_operator() and has_paren() functions using a static precedence array. A new precedence() function will be added to the Table class with a Token pointer argument that will use the new Token precedence() function.

The values in the static precedence array within the Token class will be initialized to -1 if the token type has an associated table entry, otherwise the value is set to the desired precedence. For the Command, Operator and IntFuncP token types that have table entries, the token precedence will be set to -1 and for the DefFuncP and Paren token types, the precedence will be set to 2 (the same as the open parentheses precedence). The other token types won't be pushed to the hold stack so no value is needed at the moment.