[ruby-core:33693] Re: Towards a standardized AST for Ruby code

(2010/12/13 1:54), Haase, Konstantin wrote:
> Also, such a parser cannot be used to inspect a live system (accessing the AST for a method or closure, for instance) unless it would be possible to access the source code of those (as in JavaScript). Therefore it cannot be used for say partial evaluation in a live system (pypy does this for generating extremely fast code).

I doubt MRI people (namely Matz) allow you to access a live system AST.  They
believe ASTs are not standard part of Ruby.  These days any small part of MRI
tend to be regarded as a Ruby standard (like refinements) and that would bind
core people not to change it.  Language designers tend to hesitate the
situation they cannot touch their own language internals.  So, as far as this
proposal is aiming to make a standard, to inspect a live system is fairly
undesirable for them.