Cursor.semanticParent

Determine the semantic parent of the given cursor.

The semantic parent of a cursor is the cursor that semantically contains the given cursor. For many declarations, the lexical and semantic parents are equivalent (the lexical parent is returned by clang_getCursorLexicalParent()). They diverge when declarations or definitions are provided out-of-line. For example:

class C {
 void f();
}

void C::f() { }

In the out-of-line definition of C::f, the semantic parent is the the class C, of which this function is a member. The lexical parent is the place where the declaration actually occurs in the source code; in this case, the definition occurs in the translation unit. In general, the lexical parent for a given entity can change without affecting the semantics of the program, and the lexical parent of different declarations of the same entity may be different. Changing the semantic parent of a declaration, on the other hand, can have a major impact on semantics, and redeclarations of a particular entity should all have the same semantic context.

In the example above, both declarations of C::f have C as their semantic context, while the lexical context of the first C::f is C and the lexical context of the second C::f is the translation unit.

For global declarations, the semantic parent is the translation unit.