Ambiguous AST ?

Hi,


I am writing a front end for something like Pascal. I want to separate
as much as possible the parsing from the semantic analysis,
intermediate code, and code generation in order to mantain a clear
organization.


Clearly, I want to postpone symbol table creation to a second pass
over the ast created during parsing (otherwise, i.e. if I were
creating the symbol tables during parsing, it wouldn't be logical to
delay e.g. type checking until later). Now, Pascal's syntax is
semantically ambiguous, in particular one cannot know if a identifier
in an expression is a variable reference or a function call without
arguments.


My question is the following: since I have no way of knowing which
case it is without symbol table information (which I have not
collected during parsing time), would it be
practical/logical/realistic to have an "ambiguous" ast data structure
(an ast node that doesn't specify which of the two cases I have
encountered) and then translate that (during semantic analysis) to the
corresponding data structure (according to the info collected while
processing the declarations).


Any kind of comment/option/etc would be inmensely appreciated.


Regards,
nob.

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