I'm not exactly sure what you're having trouble with. But, I would imagine you calculate the base address of the instance and then add a pre-calculated offset to it depending on what member variable is actually being referenced. For instance:

struct testInner{  int a;  int b;}struct testOuter{  testInner inner;  int d;}  

In this case, I would imagine testInner::a to have an offset of 0, and testInner::b to have an offset of 4. testInner has an overall size of 8 bytes. Now testOuter::inner would have an offset of 0, and testOuter::d would have an offset of 8.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, but let me illustrate with another example:

struct testAnother{  int p;  testOuter outer;}  

In this setup, testAnother: would have an offset of 0. testAnother::outer would have an offset of 4. However, if you wanted to access say, testAnother::outer::inner::b you would have to do something like, calculate the offset of testAnother::outer (4), then the offset of outer::inner (0) and add that to the parent offset, then the offset of inner::b (4) and add that to the parent offset. So after doing that the total offset would be 8.

So assuming you had a statement like

anInstance.outer.inner.b = 4;   

in an AST, you would need to recursively sum the offset of the current identifier set (parent::child) with the offsets of any parent identifier sets. Maybe this would be a member variable of your compiler object, and be sure to reset it each time you begin a new identifier.

Some pseudo code may look like this:

for each node in the AST  if node.type is member-operator    lookup offset of node.rightchild.leftchild from node.leftchild    add that to the current-total-offset    recurse to my right child  if node.type is end-of-statement    set current-total-offset to zero   

This assumes that the AST for a statement such as the one above has the operators as the "parents" of each pair. The leftside of the operator would be the left child, and the right side of the operator would be the subtree for the remaining portion of the statement, which could be either another identifier or another member-operator with more child identifiers.

Hope that helps!

- Jason Citron
- www.jasoncitron.net

[edited by - clash on March 5, 2004 12:58:48 PM]

[edited by - clash on March 5, 2004 1:01:25 PM]