leanprover / leanprover/reference-manual
Clarify difference between SyntaxNodeKind and syntactic category
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Description
What question should the reference manual answer?
I'm reading up on macros. Just as last time I did so, I got confused about the difference between a node's "syntax kind" and "syntactic categories". Could the manual entry for "syntax kind" (which btw. simply points to the node constructor ATM instead of SyntaxNodeKind) have a sentence to distinguish the two? Could there be an additional sentence involving an example?
Additional context
From grepping around I think that "syntax kind" corresponds to the name of an AST data constructor in parsers that I'm used to, and "syntactic category" (the entry of which is crisp) is the open data type into which such a constructor injects. Not sure if that's a useful analogy, especially if you have never heard of abstract syntax trees.
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Research direction
In the reference manual, find the entry for “syntax kind,” which currently points to the node constructor rather than SyntaxNodeKind; compare it with the “syntactic category” entry. Add a sentence distinguishing the two and an example, then verify that both entries explain their relationship clearly.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Domain
- documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 48/100