Can't use a variable as a dice roll about rpgdice HOT 2 CLOSED

See, this is a tricky one. While I get why I wanted this, I either need to make Variables smarter (i.e. make them try to evaluate themselves) or I have to make Operations smarter, and try to evaluate Variables.

I think I like the first one better; part of being a 'variable' could simply be, "we must resolve ourself to the correct basic type on evaluation'.

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Second tricky part: How to prevent recursion? Do we not pass in the scope, do we unset our key from the scope, or do we attempt to detect recursion, and throw an error?

Here's how I break those down:

1. Don't pass in outer scope
   • Pro: Simplest option; we only ever evaluate one level of nesting.
   • Con: Doesn't allow for Weapon.Damage to equal 1d6 + 'Abilities.StrMod', an easy to imagine use case.
2. Unset our key from the scope
   • Pro: It immediately breaks any recursion, while still allowing for nesting.
   • Pro: Covers all reasonable use cases, while disallowing clearly abusive ones.
   • Con: It is both difficult and slow to emulate _.unset.
   • Con: Requires cloning the scope; the deeper nested, the more clones of the scope are made. (If scope is a large object, this could run us out of memory.)
3. Detect recursion, and throw an error
   1. Detect by name reference
      • Pro: Detects blatantly abusive case, without modifying anything
      • Con: Easily defeated, since it doesn't detect cycles.
      • Con: Difficult to implement.
   2. Store current depth in scope, limit to a maximum value
      • Pro: Usage agnostic, simply limits maximum parsing depth.
      • Pro: Trivial Implementation.
      • Con: Modifies scope; we shouldn't touch a user's object.
      • Con: 'leaks' maximum depth.
      • Con: Does not directly address recursion, so it might not be obvious what's wrong.
   3. Store current depth in Expression, limit to a maximum value
      • Pro: Usage agnostic, simply limits maximum parsing depth.
      • Pro: Trivial Implementation.
      • Con: Does not directly address recursion, so it might not be obvious what's wrong.

At this point, after working all of that out, I'm opting for 3.3, since it seems the easiest to implement, and seems a reasonable guard.

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