Common use of ABSTRACT SYNTAX TREE Clause in Contracts

ABSTRACT SYNTAX TREE. The class CW_CONTROLLER decides if the wizard parses the .NET assembly or the XML file. For that it looks up whether a XML file exists or not. The .NET parser and the XML parser produce an abstract syntax tree (AST) that contains the data to produce Eiffel proxy classes and their XML representation containing the contracts. The AST is a list of elements of type CW_TYPE. An instance of CW_TYPE has features (CW_FEATURE), interfaces (CW_INTERFACE) and invariants (CW_INVARIANT). A feature can either be a routine (CW_ROUTINE) or an attribute (CW_ATTRIBUTE). Attributes represent fields; routines represent computations applicable to all instances of a class. A routine may has multiple arguments (CW_ARGUMENT). It is further classified into a function (CW_FUNCTION) if it returns a result or a procedure (CW_PROCEDURE) otherwise. Each feature has a list of preconditions (CW_PRECONDITION) and postconditions (CW_POSTCONDITION).