ChocoPy/WORKLOG.md

# Compiler Construction PA3 Worklog


## Team:
**Apoorva Ranade**(ar6496)   **Sanjar Ahmadov**(sa5640)   **Yinqi Sun**(ys3540)
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## Challenges:
 -  Nested structures were a challenge. A function inside a function/class needs us to build correct scoping as well as deal with dependencies.
    -  This is dealt by the class:StackVarRuntimeInfo and function:getStackVar. Dynamic links were maintained in the call stack for each function to access stack frames of previous function.
 -  Handling Strings was difficult as storage and access was more complex than lists.
    -  In order for us to easily determine the correctness, we intentionally matches the error messages to the reference implementation.
 -  Creation and use of objects was a major challenge.
    -  Objects required allocation of space on the heap and access to each object required dereferencing the pointer to the objects.
 -  Testing various scenarious with similarly defined variables were time consuming. 
 -  Synchronizing the implementation was extra challening for pa3 compared to previous ones. Reason was the flexbility and freedom of the code generation step. Our RISC-V code did not need to match the one generated by reference compiler though we tried to get as close to it as we can. 
 	- Agreeing on the common interfaces and behavior of the compiler was necessary to make synchronization easier.

## Improvements: 
  - More checks and error messages.
    - Added extra error state to the compiler if the actual parameter and formal parameter of the function can not resolve to a type. For example, if function expects an integer type parameter while the caller passes in a string typed param then our compiler will warn the user accordingly