Incomplete AST for completion?

[Milian Wolff]

Hi guys!

Would it be possible to use the AST when building the completion items? I 
really dislike that we have to do so much string operations for evaluating the 
type of completion. Yet the problem I see is that completion should still 
(somewhat) work when the document is invalid.

So coul incomplete AST exist? Could we use these in the completion context?

Background:
Look at the following PHP snippets, assume that your cursor is at "..." and 
you request the completion list. In all of these cases the uppercase 
identifiers have to be filtered from the result:

should only show classes but not ASDF itself:
class ASDF extends ...

should only show interfaces but neither FOO nor BAR:
class asdf implements FOO, BAR, ...

should only show interfaces but neither FOO nor BAR nor ASDF:
interface FOO extends BAR, ASDF, ...

There are possibly far more examples like these. Assuming I'd have an 
incomplete AST up to the position of the cursor, couldn't I then easily 
traverse the tree to get whatever I need? Furthermore: Wouldn't I easily know 
what kind of stuff the user is trying to write (compare with the "expected FOO 
BAR" messages our parsers emit) - that kind of info would be very handy for 
evaluation the list of completion items!

Any idea if this is at all possible?
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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