## Summary
Our current mechanism for handling deletions (e.g., `del x`) is to
remove the symbol from the scope's `bindings` table. This "does the
right thing", in that if we then reference a deleted symbol, we're able
to determine that it's unbound -- but it causes a variety of problems,
mostly in that it makes certain bindings and references unreachable
after-the-fact.
Consider:
```python
x = 1
print(x)
del x
```
If we analyze this code _after_ running the semantic model over the AST,
we'll have no way of knowing that `x` was ever introduced in the scope,
much less that it was bound to a value, read, and then deleted --
because we effectively erased `x` from the model entirely when we hit
the deletion.
In practice, this will make it impossible for us to support local symbol
renames. It also means that certain rules that we want to move out of
the model-building phase and into the "check dead scopes" phase wouldn't
work today, since we'll have lost important information about the source
code.
This PR introduces two new `BindingKind` variants to model deletions:
- `BindingKind::Deletion`, which represents `x = 1; del x`.
- `BindingKind::UnboundException`, which represents:
```python
try:
1 / 0
except Exception as e:
pass
```
In the latter case, `e` gets unbound after the exception handler
(assuming it's triggered), so we want to handle it similarly to a
deletion.
The main challenge here is auditing all of our existing `Binding` and
`Scope` usages to understand whether they need to accommodate deletions
or otherwise behave differently. If you look one commit back on this
branch, you'll see that the code is littered with `NOTE(charlie)`
comments that describe the reasoning behind changing (or not) each of
those call sites. I've also augmented our test suite in preparation for
this change over a few prior PRs.
### Alternatives
As an alternative, I considered introducing a flag to `BindingFlags`,
like `BindingFlags::UNBOUND`, and setting that at the appropriate time.
This turned out to be a much more difficult change, because we tend to
match on `BindingKind` all over the place (e.g., we have a bunch of code
blocks that only run when a `BindingKind` is
`BindingKind::Importation`). As a result, introducing these new
`BindingKind` variants requires only a few changes at the client sites.
Adding a flag would've required a much wider-reaching change.
Charlie Marsh
Micha Reiser
Jeong, YunWon