running out of bits in lexer

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi devs,

I'm in the process of reimplementing role annotations (#8185). I need to add a new pseudo-keyword 'role' to the lexer, and I'm initially tempted to guard the lexing of this keyword with an extension bit (like, say, tyFamBit in Lexer.x). But, there are already bits 0 to 31 taken, and the type of the bitmap is Int, so I'm out of luck.

However, I think there's a way out: the parser should do the right thing when it sees these pseudo-keywords, and hopefully the downstream code could check the enabled options. So, it would seem that having some of these bit controls in the lexer is unnecessary -- more a belt-and-suspenders thing than anything else.

So, I propose to let the lexer treat 'role' specially in all cases, relying on the parser to treat it like an ordinary varid except when 'role' comes right after 'type'.

Is there something I'm missing here? In particular, I can't think of a good reason not to treat the pseudo-keyword 'family' in the same way and allow it to lex regardless of the extensions. This might also improve error messages.

Thanks,
Richard