/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package jakarta.servlet.jsp.el;


/**
 * <p>The abstract class for a prepared expression.</p>
 *
 * <p>An instance of an Expression can be obtained via from an
 * ExpressionEvaluator instance.</p>
 *
 * <p>An Expression may or not have done a syntactic parse of the expression.
 * A client invoking the evaluate() method should be ready for the case
 * where ELParseException exceptions are raised. </p>
 *
 * @since JSP 2.0
 * @deprecated As of JSP 2.1, replaced by jakarta.el.ValueExpression
 */
@Deprecated
public abstract class Expression {

    /**
     * Evaluates an expression that was previously prepared.  In some
     * implementations preparing an expression involves full syntactic
     * validation, but others may not do so.  Evaluating the expression may
     * raise an ELParseException as well as other ELExceptions due to
     * run-time evaluation.
     *
     * @param vResolver A VariableResolver instance that can be used at
     *   runtime to resolve the name of implicit objects into Objects.
     * @return The result of the expression evaluation.
     *
     * @exception ELException Thrown if the expression evaluation failed.
     */
    public abstract Object evaluate( VariableResolver vResolver )
        throws ELException;
}

