Abstract problem description:
The way I see it, unparsing means to create a token stream from an AST, which when parsed again produces an equal AST.
So parse(unparse(AST)) = AST holds.
This is the equal to finding a valid parse tree which would produce the same AST.
The language is described by a context free S-attributed grammar using a eBNF variant.
So the unparser has to find a valid 'path' through the traversed nodes in which all grammar constraints hold. This bascially means to find a valid allocation of AST nodes to grammar production rules. This is a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in general and could be solved, like parsing, by backtracking in O(exp(n)).
Fortunately for parsing, this can be done in O(n³) using GLR (or better restricting the grammar). Because the AST structure is so close to the grammar production rule structure, I was really surprised seeing an implementation where the runtime is worse than parsing: XText uses ANTLR for parsing and backtracking for unparsing.
Questions
- Is a context free S-attribute grammar everything a parser and unparser need to share or are there further constraints, e.g. o