This module defines an interface which can be used to build the front-end representation (FER) of a parsed Dylan ™ program.

Note that this module actually defines two interfaces: <flow-builder>, an abstract interface for constructing basic blocks (see the section called “The Flow Module”); and <fer-builder>, a more specific version of that interface which is used to construct the front-end representation. It's not apparent that the former, more general interface is actually used anywhere else.

This interface is implemented by the Front module.

The optimize-component generic function gets implemented by the Compiler-Optimize library. We need to figure out why it's defined here instead of there.

This module defines the primitive operations which may appear in Dylan ™ code.

This module does all the heavy lifting for the front-end of the compiler. It's split across a number of source files:

To add a new class to the FER hiearchy, you'll need to add code to the following files: front.dylan, fer-dump.dylan, clone.dylan, fer-od.dylan and base/od-format.dylan. If you miss any of these spots, things will break in various entertaining ways.

This module contains code for dumping the front-end representation as ODF (see the section called “OD-Format Module”). Special case is taken to make sure that all dumps start with a <function-literal> object; smaller components of the front-end representation can not be dumped individually.

This module implements various subclasses of <definition> representing functions (see the section called “The Definitions Module”). Most of the machinery for adding methods to a generic function at compile-time lives here, as does a good chunk of code related to sealing.

This module implements <variable-definition>. It also contains some of the code for handling load-time type expressions.

This is not a very meaty module. It doesn't make much sense in the absence of the Compiler-Convert library. It does, however, contain a few classes for describing the things found at the top level of a Dylan ™ file and provides the generic function finalize-top-level-form, which is called by the compilation driver once everything has been parsed.

This should not be confused with the Top-Level-Expressions module, which instantiates the data structures defined in this module.