Semantic analyzer with grammatical-number enforcement within a namespace
A software development environment supports grammatical-number enforcement on the names of different data types. The development environment, a computer system that programmers use to create and maintain a computer program, employs a namespace of symbolic names that are unique within a set of expressions available to the program. A type checker ensures that each name identifying an expression in a namespace does not have more than one data type. Thus, for instance, the variable “chair” cannot be both an integer and a character string. A grammatical-number enforcer with access to a dictionary enforces a naming convention within the namespace that groups grammatical-number name variants by data type to reduce type errors and thus speeds up the development environment.
1. A method of enforcing a naming convention within a namespace of expressions, the method comprising:
receiving a first request to create, in the namespace of expressions, a first expression of a grammatical number and a first data type, the first request including a descriptive name of the first expression and the grammatical number;
adding, responsive to the first request, the first expression of the grammatical number and the first data type to the namespace of expressions;
receiving a second request to create in the namespace of expressions a second expression of a second data type different from the first data type, the second request including a grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name; and
issuing an error message response to the second request.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising adding, responsive to the first request, a third expression of a second grammatical number and the first data type to the namespace of expressions, the third expression including the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name.
3. The method of claim 2 , further comprising adding, responsive to the first request, a fourth expression of the first data type to the namespace of expressions, the fourth expression including a second grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the grammatical number is one.
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the grammatical number is more than one.
6. The method of claim 1 , the first request further comprising a component name of the first expression, the component name of a first component-name data type.
7. The method of claim 6 , further comprising:
receiving a third request to create in the namespace of expressions a third expression with a grammatical-number variant of the component name; and
issuing a second error message responsive to the third request.
8. The method of claim 7 , the grammatical-number variant of the component name having a second component-name data type, the method further comprising comparing the first component-name data type with the second component-name data type.
9. The method of claim 8 , further comprising issuing a second error message response to a mismatch between the first component-name data type and the second component-name data type.
10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first request is authored by a first programmer and the second request is authored by a second programmer.
11. A software-development environment instantiated on a computer system including a processor and a memory, the computer system having access to a namespace of expressions in the memory, the software-development environment comprising:
an editor to receive a source-code expression of a computer program; and
a semantic analyzer coupled to the editor, the semantic analyzer to extract from the source-code expression:
a first request to create, in the namespace of expressions, a first expression of a grammatical number and a first data type, the first request including a descriptive name of the first expression and the grammatical number; and
a second request to create, in the namespace of expressions, a second expression of a second data type different from the first data type, the second request including a grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name;
the semantic analyzer including a grammatical-number enforcer to issue an error message responsive to the second request.
12. The software-development environment of claim 11 , the grammatical-number enforcer to add to the namespace of expressions, responsive to the first request, a third expression of the first data type and including the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name of the first expression.
13. The software-development environment of claim 11 , the semantic analyzer to add the descriptive name to the namespace of expressions responsive to the first request.
14. The software-development environment of claim 13 , the semantic analyzer to add the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name to the namespace of expressions responsive to the first request.
15. The software-development environment of claim 14 , the semantic analyzer to add the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name to the namespace of expressions responsive to a third request.
16. A computer-implemented method for creating and maintaining data in memory for a computer program, the method comprising:
receiving a request to associate a data type for the computer program with a first expression having a descriptive name;
determining, responsive to the request to associate the data type for the computer program with the first expression, a grammatical number of the descriptive name and a grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name;
reserving the first expression of the data type and the descriptive name in the memory; and
reserving a second expression of the data type in the memory, the second expression including the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name.
17. The computer-implemented method of claim 16 , further comprising adding the descriptive name to a namespace responsive to the request to associate the data type for the computer program with the first expression.
18. The computer-implemented method of claim 17 , further comprising adding the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name to the namespace responsive to the request to associate the data type for the computer program with the first expression.
19. The computer-implemented method of claim 17 , further comprising adding the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name to the namespace responsive to a second request to associate the data type for the computer program with the grammatical-number variant of the descriptive name.