Skip to content

Give integer literals a sign instead of relying on negation expressions #835

Closed
@oli-obk

Description

@oli-obk

Proposal

Signed negative literals (e.g. -12) currently are represented as an unary negation expression with a positive literal inside. I want to change this to have literals (signed int, unsuffixed int, and floats) to contain a flag that states whether there's a negative sign.

From HIR onwards this is implemented in rust-lang/rust#136860 which shows that while moderately invasive, not as invasive as I feared.

Doing the same in the AST will require more care, as macro_rules macros can detect lit fragments, which today do not include negated literals.

The repeated usage of checking for a negated expression of a literal is imo an anti-pattern that we should avoid by accepting this MCP.

Mentors or Reviewers

If you have a reviewer or mentor in mind for this work, mention them
here. You can put your own name here if you are planning to mentor the
work.

Process

The main points of the Major Change Process are as follows:

  • File an issue describing the proposal.
  • A compiler team member or contributor who is knowledgeable in the area can second by writing @rustbot second.
    • Finding a "second" suffices for internal changes. If however, you are proposing a new public-facing feature, such as a -C flag, then full team check-off is required.
    • Compiler team members can initiate a check-off via @rfcbot fcp merge on either the MCP or the PR.
  • Once an MCP is seconded, the Final Comment Period begins. If no objections are raised after 10 days, the MCP is considered approved.

You can read more about Major Change Proposals on forge.

Comments

This issue is not meant to be used for technical discussion. There is a Zulip stream for that. Use this issue to leave procedural comments, such as volunteering to review, indicating that you second the proposal (or third, etc), or raising a concern that you would like to be addressed.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    T-compilerAdd this label so rfcbot knows to poll the compiler teamfinal-comment-periodThe FCP has started, most (if not all) team members are in agreementmajor-changeA proposal to make a major change to rustc

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions