Facilities for parsing and formatting type expression-like Strings into Ceylon metamodels.
The TypeParser can be used to parse an expression into a Type.
It can be configured to allow unqualified names using
Imports (which function rather like the import statement), but
by default uses full-qualified names. The parseType() function is
provided as a shortcut.
assert(is Type<> stringType = parseType("ceylon.language::String"));
// Adding a Package to the imports is like a wildcard import
assert(is Type<> stringType2 = parseType("String", [`package ceylon.language`]));
// By default the usual abbreviations are supported
assert(is Type<> optionalStringType = parseType("String?", [`package ceylon.language`]);
assert(is ParseError error = parseType("Foo?", [`package ceylon.language`]);
The TypeFormatter does the reverse and formats a Type<> to a String
(but not that the string attribute of Type is good if all you need a
fully-qualified and unabbreviated expressions).
print(TypeFormatter().format(`String[]`, [`package ceylon.language`]));
// prints "String[]"
The ModelParser supports parsing more general model reference expressions:
assert(is Function<> printFunction = parseModel("ceylon.language::print"));
But currently this doesn't support Imports, nor type abbreviations.