A pattern has emerged of wrapping Expression instances with other
Expressions in order to subtly modify their behavior. A key example of
this is in ext/dynblock, where wrap an expression in order to introduce
our additional iteration variable for expressions in dynamic blocks.
Rather than having each wrapper expression implement wrapping
implementations for our various syntax-level-analysis functions (like
ExprList and AbsTraversalForExpr), instead we define a standard mechanism
to unwrap expressions back to the lowest-level object -- usually an AST
node -- and then use this in all of our analyses that look at the
expression's structure rather than its value.
These functions permit a calling application to recognize when an
expression represents a static absolute traversal and obtain that
traversal. This allows for the unusual-but-valid case where an application
wishes to access the expression source rather than its resulting value,
when the expression source is something that can be understood as a
traversal.
An example use-case is an attribute that takes a list of other attributes
it depends on, expressed as traversals. In this case the calling
application needs to access the attribute names themselves rather than
their values, e.g. to build some sort of dependency graph to gradually
populate the scope for evaluation.
Martin Atkins
Martin Atkins