Say what a constant table is, so a reflection table can be one

[matt-edmondson]

Holotype's docs/generated-cpp-target.md closes by saying the other backends "become the same exercise once the vocabulary exists". A spike that tried to build the reflection table generate_reflection.cpp actually emits says otherwise — a header of structs and a table of rows need different things, and four of them were missing.

What was missing

Needed for	Was
FieldInfo kFields[]	no way to say a declaration is an array
inline constexpr	no storage or constness on FieldDeclaration
= { … }	a construction always wrote its type name first
.name = "mass"	MemberInitialiser threw NotSupportedException outside a constructor's initialiser list

What this adds

TypeReference.IsArray — only that it is an array, with no bound. A bound would have to be an expression rather than a number and nothing asks for one; and where the brackets go is the generator's business, since C++ is the one language here that puts them on the declarator (T name[]) rather than on the type (T[] name). Parse/ToString read and write [] so the round trip still holds.

FieldDeclaration.IsStatic and .IsConstant — the intent rather than the keyword, because no two of these languages spell it the same way and one of them spells it differently depending on where the field sits:

	namespace scope	inside a type
C++	inline constexpr	static constexpr
C#	static readonly	static readonly
Python, JavaScript	omitted	omitted

inline is what makes a namespace-scope constant safe to define in a header, which is the only place a generated one appears; a static data member is already implicitly inline, so saying it inside a type would be noise. The generator tracks that with a depth rather than a flag so a type nested in a type stays balanced.

A braced list. A ConstructionExpression with no type is the list alone — what initialises a declaration that has already named its type, an array of rows most of all, where naming the array's type again would be wrong rather than merely redundant. A MemberInitialiser among its arguments is an element that names its member: .name = v in C++, Name = v in C#, name=v in Python, { name: v } in JavaScript. The last of those is the options-object convention rather than a translation — it is the only shape in that language where the names survive at all, and the remark on the method says so.

Stacking. A list whose elements are themselves lists is a table, and a table written on one line is a diff nobody can read, so it goes one element per line with a trailing comma. A list of plain values is a value and stays where it is. The test is the shape of the data rather than a column count, because a generated file has no idea how wide anyone's editor is.

Result

inline constexpr holo::reflect::FieldInfo kRigidBodyFields[] = {
    holo::reflect::FieldInfo{ .name = "velocity", .offset = offsetof(holo::components::RigidBody, velocity), .lerp = true },
    holo::reflect::FieldInfo{ .name = "mass", .offset = offsetof(holo::components::RigidBody, mass), .lerp = false },
};

ExemplarReflectionTableTests builds that and asserts it, alongside ExemplarHeaderTests — written against the real table rather than a toy, so it fails when a generated table would.

What is still not expressible

The template<> struct Describe<T> specialisation below that table. An explicit specialisation is C++ and only C++, and whether this AST should learn it or the generator should write it is the same question static_assert raised, with the same answer available. Recorded in the new test's remarks and in the Holotype plan rather than decided here.

One behaviour change worth naming

IsPunctuation now stops a name at [ or ], or int[] would parse as a type named int[] rather than an array of int. Text the grammar still cannot read whole — int[3] — falls back to a verbatim name exactly as before, so nothing becomes lossy.

Testing

dotnet build -c Release clean, 0 warnings. Full suite 496/496 on net10.0 (this container has no .NET 9 runtime, so that leg cannot launch here — CI has both). AstFields gained the two flags so the editor's inspector can still edit every property a field has, and both round-trip through YAML.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_0165XQS7s11ssp36AEY8tvCF

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Generated by Claude Code

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
2 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
92.7% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

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