AST Coercion

The Rust parser is not very robust in the face of tt substitutions. Problems can arise when the parser is expecting a particular grammar construct and instead finds a lump of substituted tt tokens. Rather than attempt to parse them, it will often just give up. In these cases, it is necessary to employ an AST coercion.

#![allow(dead_code)]

macro_rules! as_expr { ($e:expr) => {$e} }
macro_rules! as_item { ($i:item) => {$i} }
macro_rules! as_pat  { ($p:pat) =>  {$p} }
macro_rules! as_stmt { ($s:stmt) => {$s} }

as_item!{struct Dummy;}

fn main() {
    as_stmt!(let as_pat!(_) = as_expr!(42));
}

These coercions are often used with push-down accumulation macros in order to get the parser to treat the final tt sequence as a particular kind of grammar construct.

Note that this specific set of macros is determined by what macros are allowed to expand to, not what they are able to capture. That is, because macros cannot appear in type position¹, you cannot have an as_ty! macro.