[erlang-questions] How to get syntax tree out of abstract forms?

[Richard Carlsson]

On 02/07/2013 02:55 PM, Justin Calleja wrote:
> I would like to use the postorder/2 function in the comments of erl_syntax:
>
> postorder(F, Tree) ->
>          F(case erl_syntax:subtrees(Tree) of
>              [] -> Tree;
>              List -> erl_syntax:update_tree(Tree,
>                                  [[postorder(F, Subtree)
>                                    || Subtree <- Group]
>                                   || Group <- List])
>            end).
>
> to traverse a syntax tree and do some kind of manipulation.
>
> The problems is that, although the documentation (or how I understood
> the doc anyway) claims that abstract forms are a subset of syntax trees,

Yes, an abstract form is also an AST that can be used with e.g. 
erl_syntax:subtrees(). However, a *list* of abstract forms is not a 
tree. What you can do is to give your list to erl_syntax:form_list(Fs) 
to get a single AST that represents all the forms, and then pass that 
tree to your traversal function.

    /Richard