agentm / project-m36

Project: M36 Relational Algebra Engine
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prevent With clause name shadowing #359

Open agentm opened 1 year ago

agentm commented 1 year ago

Name shadowing can be quite a footgun. Example:

TutorialD (master/main): x:=with (x as true) x
("with type",Relation (attributesFromList []) (RelationTupleSet {asList = []}))
("with type",Relation (attributesFromList []) (RelationTupleSet {asList = []}))
TutorialD (master/main): :showexpr x
ERR: RelVarAlreadyDefinedError "x"

The original expression should almost certainly be rejected, but the relational expression validation is sound, so we would need to check that the new relvarname "x" is not mentioned in the with clause names.

I am toying with the idea of preventing name shadowing of relvars or other with clause macro names (even macros shadowing macros). It does seem that name shadowing can be sometimes useful when moving subexpressions around, but the risk and cost of mistakes here is very high.

Any objection?

YuMingLiao commented 1 year ago
TutorialD (master/main): x:=with (x as true) x
TutorialD (master/main): :showexpr x
┌┐
││
├┤
└┘

It seems fine on my machine. I would like to give opinions but I found myself not understand the issue here at all. What's the risk?

agentm commented 1 year ago

Indeed, it's just on a future branch, but what's the point of supporting that expression? It makes substitution much more difficult and optimizations have to track shadowed names recursively.

YuMingLiao commented 1 year ago

I see. I can't think of a useful example either.