String Pool Interning Saves the Weakly Separable Day

I just took a swim in the string pool. Who would have thought that interning strings would be so useful for weak separability in Mint?

I knew before that we had some problems calling [cci lang=”java”]String.equals[/cci] in a separable method, like the [cci lang=”java”]Env.get(String y)[/cci] method that does an environment look-up, because [cci lang=”java”]String.equals[/cci] wasn’t declared separable itself. That’s why I used the [cci lang=”java”]==[/cci] operator in the initial Lint interpreter I wrote for the PLDI 2010 paper:

[cc lang=”java”]public static separable Env ext(final Env env,
final String x,
final Code v) {
return new Env() {
public separable Code get(String y) {
// error: if (x.equals(y))
if (x==y)
return v;
else
return env.get(y);
}
};
} [/cc]

This wasn’t a problem because we didn’t have a parser and were creating our ASTs using hand-written Java code. The variable names are string constants, which are always interned:

[cc lang=”java”]public static Program term10times20plus30 = new Program
(new Add(new Mul(new Var(“x”), new Var(“y”)), new Int(30)),
new Definition(“x”, <|10|>),
new Definition(“y”, <|20|>));[/cc]

Tonight, I wrote a reflection-based S-expression parser, and now the variable names are substrings of a longer string:

[cc lang=”java”]public static Program parsedTerm10times20plus30 = new Program
(parser.LintParser.parse(Exp.class, “(Add (Mul (Var x) (Var y)) (Int 30))”),
new Definition(“x”, <|10|>),
new Definition(“y”, <|20|>));[/cc]

Substrings aren’t interned automatically, and the comparison using [cci lang=”java”]==[/cci] fails. Fortunately, I can simply intern the strings when I create the [cci lang=”java”]Var[/cci] AST nodes and the [cci lang=”java”]Definition[/cci] variable bindings:

[cc lang=”java”]public static class Var implements Exp {
private String _s;
public Var(String s) {
_s = s.intern(); // must intern here, so we can use == in the ext method below
}
public separable Code eval(Env e) {
return e.get(_s);
}
}
public static class Definition {
private String _name;
private Code _v;
public Definition(String name, Code v) {
_name = name.intern(); // must intern here, so we can use == in the ext method above
_v = v;
}
public separable String name() { return _name; }
public separable Code value() { return _v; }
}[/cc]