So you thought you could do term rewriting in C++, ey? I got the idiom for representing ASTs in C++ figured out. Of course, the idiom is well-known, it's an instantiation of this, but it took me a while of struggling with the template library and some googling to get right.
Basically, terms in the datatype derive from an abstract class. Since an abstract class cannot be instantiated, C++ more or less forces you to pass references back as the result of functions. Moreover, since the abstract class doesn't know how to copy objects from the stack to the heap, the solution is to write a copying constructor and clone method for each variant.
This is a lot of cruft, the source code is going to explode on it. It's a very heavy price to pay for not being willing to implement the interpreter/compiler in a functional language such as SML.
But yeah. I chose C++ because reasons.
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