Linking source code with an animation can be accomplished using line numbers alone, as I’ve shown in code hyperlink experiment.
Of course, line numbers can easily get out of sync. So it would be preferable to link by some other kind of expression.
For example, say I want a function in a specific class to be highlighted, imagine I used an expression like ClassName#functionName or class(ClassName) + fun(functionName).
Today I did some research into doing that, but didn’t find anything great. There is of course acorn to parse code, but the harder part is querying. I found astq to query the AST, but the query syntax is a bit cumbersome for my needs.
I thought about rolling my own, but found it would be a bigger task.
Ideally, I’d like a query syntax like:
function: fun(name)
var: var(name)
class: class(name)
class + function: class(name) + fun(name)
var inside class function: class(name) + fun(name) + var(name)
multiple: [class(nameA), class(nameB)]Then I could define a hyperlink:
<a href="code:class(Person) + fun(name)">Person.name()</a>I think I’ll have to give it some more thought.