[ruby-core:33695] Re: Towards a standardized AST for Ruby code

On Dec 12, 2010, at 08:54 , Haase, Konstantin wrote:

> On Dec 12, 2010, at 17:46 , Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> 
>> The only down side at the moment is that RubyParser does not support
>> 1.9 syntax.
> 
> 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 have asked until I was blue in the face for 1.9 to be extended w/ optional live AST access. It would make really powerful tools available to all rubyists across 1.8 and 1.9. Despite this desirable fact, it has been rejected time and time again.

I've gotten rather lame responses on why it is undesirable (usually memory--which seems moot if the AST is only available given a cmdline flag or other opt-in only option).

I've since given up asking and left it to others to ask. (Like at rubyconf 2010's "ask matz" session--thank you!)