Hello all,

I would like to structure some tools as a pipeline that generates and consumes f# values in human readable form, where the tools do stepwise refinement of a structure that is the result of a output_any call. So, the pipeline starts with parsing some source code, building an AST, and then prints the tree using print_any. The subsequent tools do further analysis and modifications to the tree. To parse the file called myfile, to have the type information updated in the tree and then the result printed in some prettyprinted format, I would use:

1

parse <myfile | updatetypeinfo | prettyprint

This structure has a few advantages: At any time you can write the output to a file and use that file to feed later stages, allowing easier test. You can use precooked files as input at any stage in the pipe line etc.

The problem is, while the print_any function does just what I want (i.e. provides a human readable form of the value), there does not seem to be an easy way to read it back again and regenerate a value from it. In other words, there is no "input_any". I realize that such a function would be difficult to deal with from a type perspective because it does not know until runtime what the type is, but in my case I know before hand exactly what type the tree is.

One solution is to read the text and try to simulate

1

let val = <content> 

but I do not know how this could be done.

If anyone has a solution, I'd love to hear about it.

BR Pvillads