NixOS/nix — pull request #188 by shlevy (2014-01-01 00:00:33+00:00)
Title: Dynamic attrs mixed

This adds new syntax for attribute names:

* `attrs."${name}"` => `getAttr name attrs`
* `attrs ? "${name}"` => `isAttrs attrs && hasAttr attrs name`
* `attrs."${name}" or def` => `if attrs ? "${name}" then attrs."${name}" else def`
* `{ "${name}" = value; }` => `listToAttrs [{ inherit name value; }]`

Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. The attribute chains
can be arbitrarily long and contain combinations of static and dynamic
parts (e.g. `attrs."${foo}".bar."${baz}" or qux`), which is relatively
straightforward for the `getAttrs`/`hasAttrs` cases but is more complex for
the `listToAttrs` case due to rules about duplicate attribute definitions.

For attribute sets with dynamic attribute names, duplicate static
attributes are detected at parse time while duplicate dynamic attributes
are detected when the attribute set is forced. So, for example, `{ a =
null; a.b = null; "${"c"}" = true; }` will be a parse-time error, while
`{ a = {}; "${"a"}".b = null; c = true; }` will be an eval-time error
(technically that case could theoretically be detected at parse time,
but the general case would require full evaluation). Moreover, duplicate
dynamic attributes are not allowed even in cases where they would be
with static attributes (`{ a.b.d = true; a.b.c = false; }` is legal, but `{
a."${"b"}".d = true; a."${"b"}".c = false; }` is not). This restriction
might be relaxed in the future in cases where the static variant would
not be an error, but it is not obvious that that is desirable.

Finally, recursive attribute sets with dynamic attributes have the
static attributes in scope but not the dynamic ones. So `rec { a = true;
"${"b"}" = a; }` is equivalent to `{ a = true; b = true; }` but `rec {
"${"a"}" = true; b = a; }` would be an error or use a from the
surrounding scope if it exists.

Note that the `getAttr`, `getAttr or default`, and `hasAttr` are all
implemented purely in the parser as syntactic sugar, while attribute
sets with dynamic attribute names required changes to the AST to be
implemented cleanly.

This is an alternative solution to and closes #167