go/types: confusing behaviour of Selection.Indirect() for Kind()==MethodVal

[adonovan]

In go/types/selection.go, the intended significance of the Indirect flag (for MethodVal)
is hard to tell from the example.  I was assuming that is means whether there are any
pointer indirections between the type of the receiver and the declared type of the
method, but that doesn't seem to explain it:

I instrumented recordSelection:

% cat sel.go 

package main

type T struct {}

func (T)f() {}
func (*T)g() {}

func main() {
        var x T
        x.f()
        x.g()

        var p *T
        p.f()
        p.g()
}

% ./ssadump sel.go
sel.go:11:2: SEL method (main.T) f() indirect=false
sel.go:12:2: SEL method (main.T) g() indirect=false
sel.go:15:2: SEL method (*main.T) f() indirect=true
sel.go:16:2: SEL method (*main.T) g() indirect=true

In the last selection, there is no actual indirection between the receiver type *T and
the method type *T, yet the indirect flag is reported as true.  (The indirect flag seems
to record only the pointerness of the receiver, which is redundant information.)

I think, by analogy with field selections, the indirect bit should be set iff there was
an implicit pointer indirection between the actual receiver type and the formal receiver
type, e.g a (T) method was called with an expression of type (*T), or in this example:

   type A struct {}
   func (*A) f() {}
   type B struct {*A}

   ... B{}.f()   // indirect, since method (*A).f 

An (A) method is called with an expression of type B.

[ianlancetaylor]

Comment 1:

Labels changed: added repo-tools, release-go1.4.

[griesemer]

Comment 2:

Status changed to Accepted.

[rsc]

Comment 3:

go/types is not a released package. Unless this is affecting a released binary (namely
godoc), this is not for any release.

Labels changed: added release-none, removed release-go1.4.

[griesemer]

Comment 4:

It does not affect godoc. It's fine to delay this.

[griesemer]

I'm not sure we can change this at this point. @adonovan please comment on this issue, or close otherwise. Thanks.