C++: Conceptual problem in designing an intepreter
- by sub
I'm programming an interpreter for an experimental programming language (educational, fun,...)
So far, everything went well (Tokenizer & Parser), but I'm getting a huge problem with some of the data structures in the part that actually runs the tokenized and parsed code.
My programming language basically has only two types, int and string, and they are represented as C++ strings (std class) and ints
Here is a short version of the data structure that I use to pass values around:
enum DataType
{
Null,
Int,
String
}
class Symbol
{
public:
string identifier;
DataType type;
string stringValue;
int intValue;
}
I can't use union because string doesn't allow me to.
This structure above is beginning to give me a headache.
I have to scatter code like this everywhere in order to make it work, it is beginning to grow unmaintainable:
if( mySymbol.type == Int )
{
mySymbol.intValue = 1234;
} else {
mySymbol.stringValue = "abcde";
}
I use the Symbol data structure for variables, return values for functions and general representation of values in the programming language.
Is there any better way to solve this? I hope so!
