GENERALIZED EXPRESSION TREES
Expression tree versatility and applicability are enhanced to facilitate programming across various program languages and execution contexts. An expression tree can represent programmatic code as data in a representation common to multiple process mechanisms. As a result, entire programs or portions thereof can be captured and processed by a numerous common language components. Further, language specific concepts can be reduced to the common representation to enable language independent employment.
1 . A system to facilitate computer program processing, comprising:
a computer-readable medium; and
a producer component that generates an expression tree that captures syntax and semantics of a computer program in a form common to multiple programming languages and stores the expression tree at least temporarily on the computer-readable medium.
2 . The system of claim 1 , the expression tree represents program statements as special expressions.
3 . The system of claim 2 , the statements are represented as void returning expressions
4 . The system of claim 1 , the expression tree includes unbound, and/or dynamic nodes.
5 . The system of claim 1 , the expression tree includes bound nodes.
6 . The system of claim 1 , a node or set of nodes comprising the expression tree includes one or more annotations that provide additional information related to the particular node or set of nodes.
7 . The system of claim 1 , the producer component generates the expression tree from source text, a language specific syntax tree, and/or a language-specific semantic tree.
8 . The system of claim 7 , the expression tree comprising a reducible node that reduces from a language specific concept it models to a common model.
9 . The system of claim 8 , the reducible node transforms language specific constructs to primitive language constructs of equivalent semantics.
10 . The system of claim 8 , the reducible node performs global reduction on the entire language specific tree or sub-tree.
11 . The system of claim 1 , further comprising a consumer component that performs an action based at least in part of the expression tree.
12 . The system of claim 11 , the consumer component is a runtime service.
13 . An expression-tree production method, comprising:
parsing at least a portion of a computer program; and
generating an expression tree common to multiple languages or with specific nodes, wherein language constructs are represented as expressions.
14 . The method of claim 13 , further comprising generating at least one of an unbounded or dynamically bound node.
15 . The method of claim 13 , further comprising annotating at least one or a subset of expression tree nodes with additional information.
16 . The method of claim 13 , further comprising reducing a program language specific construct to a primitive constructs of common representation.
17 The method of claim 16 , performing one of local reduction of a portion of the expression tree or global reduction of the entire tree or sub-tree.
18 . A computer-readable medium having stored thereon a data structure, comprising:
an expression tree comprising a one or more nodes that provide a common syntactic and semantic representation for a computer program across multiple computer languages, wherein one or more nodes are bound, unbound, or dynamic.
19 . The computer-readable medium of claim 18 , program code constructs are represented as expressions.
20 . The computer-readable medium of claim 18 , at least one node or set of nodes are annotated with additional information.