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Lookup Methods

SUIF symbol tables provide a number of methods to search for and retrieve particular types, symbols, and variable definitions. Most of these lookup methods will optionally search all the ancestor symbol tables, making it easy to determine if an object is defined in the current scope.

The lookup_type method is available at all levels in the symbol table hierarchy to search for SUIF types. Given an existing type, the method searches for a type that is the same. It uses the is_same method from the type_node class to perform these comparisons. If a matching type is not found within the current symbol table, lookup_type will continue searching in the ancestor symbol tables by default. However, if the optional up parameter is set to FALSE, it will give up after searching the first table.

Several methods are provided to lookup symbols. Each different kind of symbol (variable, procedure, and label) has its own name space, so the lookup_sym method requires that you specify both the name and the kind of symbol for which to search. This method may be used with all symbol tables. For convenience, other methods are defined as wrappers around lookup_sym. Each of these wrappers searches for a particular kind of symbol: lookup_var searches for variables, lookup_proc searches for procedures, and lookup_label searches for labels. Because procedure symbols may only be defined in global symbol tables, the lookup_proc method is declared in the global_symtab class. Similarly, the lookup_label method is declared in the block_symtab class, because labels may only be defined within procedures. By default, all of these methods search the current symbol table and, if unsuccessful, proceed to search the ancestor symbol tables. The optional up parameters may be set to FALSE to turn off this default behavior and only search the current symbol table.

A symbol for a global variable is just a declaration of that variable and does not automatically have any storage allocated. Variable definitions are required to allocate storage and to specify alignment requirements and any initial data for the variable. Since the variable definitions are not directly connected to the variable symbols, the lookup_var_def method is provided to search a symbol table for the definition of a particular variable symbol. This method does not search the parent symbol table. In general the definition method in the var_sym class is a better way to locate a variable definition.

Symbols and types are assigned ID numbers (see section Numbering Types and Symbols) that uniquely identify them within a particular context. The lookup_type_id method searches the types defined within a symbol table and its ancestors for a type with the specified ID number. The lookup_sym_id does the same thing for symbols.

Besides searching for one of the entries in a symbol table, you can also search for one of its children in the symbol table hierarchy. The lookup_child method searches through the list of children for a symbol table with a given name. This may not be very useful, but it is included for completeness.

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