TclWord

This object holds the result of parsing a tcl command. Internally, It represents a word as discrete chunks, which are either finalized or require interpolation. Each chunk is marked as such. When the word is used (at interpretation or at execution time), the required interpolation occurs (either variable or command)

Attributes

Each TclWord has the following attributes:

chunks

an array of pairs of (type, content), where type/content is

CONST: a string
VARIABLE: a perlArray suitable for passing to _Tcl::_get_var
COMMAND: the result of a the parse step for a [] command, i.e. a PerlArray of TclWords.

constant

An Integer PMC flag representing whether or not the value we hold is constant. Used as a hint at compile time.

Methods

TclWord defines the following methods:

__class_init

Define the attributes required for the class.

__init

Initialize the attributes for an instance of the class

concat_words

Given an array of words, append the chunks of a given word to the existing word

XXX - need to make this respect the constant attribute.

concat_char

Add a constant character to a TclWord

concat_const

Add a constant string to a TclWord

concat_variable

Add the name of a variable to be interpolated to a TclWord. Takes the name of the var, and an optional index for array variables.

concat_command

Add a command to be interpolated to a TclWord. Takes the text of the command, and stores the parsed version for later interpretation.

__get_pmc

Return a PMC that contains the value of our word. If we're just a command, evaluate the command and return the resulting PMC. If we're just a variable, return the PMC associated with that variable. In any other case, concat the results and return a Stringy PMC.

__get_string

Stringify - In our case, we take the individual chunks of the words and evaluate them - so if we have a TclWord that came from a string like:

        "$a + $b = [expr $a + $b]"

We have split it up internally to look like:

        VAR:     a
        CONST:   " + "
        VAR:     b
        CONST:   " = "
        COMMAND:
                WORD:
                        CONST: "expr"
                WORD:
                        VAR: a
                WORD:
                        CONST: "+"
                WORD:
                        VAR: b

And, when we ask for the string representation, the two variable interpolations are performed, and the command containing "expr" is also evaluated. The resulting string, (assuming values of 1 and 2 for a and b, respectively) is

        "1 + 2 = 3"

NB: This isn't quite the normal __get_string method, and should probably be renamed - it is returning a tcl exit code in addition to the normal string result.