It's not possible to take the address of constants (at this stage) and
trying to use a move instruction with .zero as source would result in
the VM complaining about null pointer access when bounds checking is on.
Thus, don't convert a nil source expression until it is known to be
safe, and use memset when it is not.
This fixes the problem of using the return value of a function as an
element in a compound initializer. The cause of the problem is that
compound initializers were represented by block expressions, but
function calls are contained within block expressions, so def
initialization saw the block expression and thought it was a nested
compound initializer.
Technically, it was a bug in the nested element parsing code in that it
wasn't checking the result value of the block expression, but using a
whole new expression type makes things much cleaner and the work done
paves the way for labeled initializers and compound assignments.
While expression symbols worked for what they are, they weren't so good
for ivar access because every ivar of a class (and its super classes)
would be accessed at method scope creation, generating spurious access
errors if any were private. That is, when the access checks worked at
all.
I don't remember what the goal was (stopped working on it eight months
ago), but some possibilities include:
- better handling of nil (have trouble with assigning into struts)
- automatic forward declarations ala C# and jai (I was watching vids
about jai at the time)
- something for pascal
- simply that the default symbol type should not be var (in which case,
goal accomplished)
