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From: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Re: JPI M2 2.00 - PROCEDURE FUNCTIONS & ERROR CHECKING
Message-ID: <10218@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 25 Jul 90 17:29:48 GMT
References: <1990Jul24.060519.23417@portia.Stanford.EDU> <10180@brazos.Rice.edu> <90206.084158TRL3@psuvm.psu.edu>
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In article <90206.084158TRL3@psuvm.psu.edu> TRL3@psuvm.psu.edu (Tim Larson) writes:

> you state the "single-entrance, single-exit"
>requirement, which Modula-2 neatly destroys with LOOP..END.  Is that require-
>ment necessary for the algorithm to work?

LOOP - END is ok becase all the flow must come out of the END, regardless of
how it gets there.  My particular idea needs single-entrance, single-exit,
though as another poster pointed out, we could could handle all sorts 
of nasty things during optimization when a complete flow graph
is constructed anyway.

I'll assume a recursive descent parser.  In the routine handling
statement-sequences, keep a flag called "unreachable".  Initially,
it's false.  It is set to true if we notice a RETURN, an EXIT,
or a call to HALT.  At the end of statement-sequence, return the
value of unreachable.

In a procedure (function) body, when statement-sequence returns, check the
unreachable flag.  If it's true, then we must have encountered
a RETURN or HALT.  (EXITs don't count since they should only occur
with a LOOP-END and would have already been caught by another mechanism).

Note that unreachable only applies to the current statement-sequence.
Nested statement-sequences have their own (local) variable.

At the beginning of each statement, see if it's unreachable.  If so,
you might warn the user.  If the statement is a RETURN or HALT or EXIT,
set the unreachable flag.  Also, if it's an EXIT (and the exit was reachable),
set a global flag called "exit_reached".  This will come up again in
the LOOP handling.

The other simple statements are uninteresting.

Compound statments require more care.  A RETURN occuring in a WHILE
statement is ignored, since there's always a path around the body of a WHILE.
REPEAT-UNTIL and WITH set the unreachable flag if their statement-sequence
returns true (indicating that there's a RETURN inside).

CASE statements will set unreachable if *all* of their alternatives contain
RETURNs.  I don't have a standard for M-2, but Oberon specifies
that there's no fall through for a CASE.

IF-THEN statements will set the unreachable flag if all the alternatives
contain a RETURN and there is an ELSE clause.  If there's no ELSE,
we assume there's a path around the whole statement.

LOOPs are a little tricky.  We need a global variable called
"exit_reached".  When we enter a LOOP, we preserve the old exit_reached,
a set it to false.  Then we call statement_sequence.  If any EXIT
is reched within the statement sequence (no matter how nested),
then exit_reached will be set.  At the END, we set unreachable
to NOT exit_reached.  We also restore exit_reached.

That's about it.  I implemented it last night in an Oberon parser,
and it works ok.  There are some interesting effects.
You'll get no error in this case

	BEGIN
	    LOOP
	    END
	END function;

since we'll hang in the loop and therefore never require a return.
It would be easy to print a warning in this case too, since we
have all the necessary info.  I decided not to.

Of course, there are easy examples where you'll get a complaint
and you *know* that it's unnecessary.

	BEGIN
	    IF erroneous THEN
		emit_error_and_halt(1)
	    ELSE
		RETURN 3
	    END
	END function;

Here the compiler doesn't know that "emit_error_and_halt" won't
be returning and so will complain of missing returns.
I guess I'm not too concerned, but others may have opinions.

Regarding JPI, if they've added a GOTO (as implied by an earlier posting)
then they'd have to be trickier to issue compile-time warnings.
Probably why they've gone to a run-time error.

-- 
Preston Briggs				looking for the great leap forward
preston@titan.rice.edu