From: Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@...>
Date: 2005-02-04T23:07:47+09:00
Subject: Re: lack of reaction to latest ruby implementations

On Feb 4, 2005, at 2:33 PM, mark wrote:
>> google pyggy. it includes a ansi c parser.
>> modify it to generate ruby eval-able structures
>> and load them into ruby. later on port it to ruby,
>> i'll help, i'm planning to do so anyways at some
>> point.
> After a quick look at the PyGgy site, 
> http://www.lava.net/~newsham/pyggy/, it seems to be a parser generator 
> written in Python. In which case it might be better to use either Racc 
> or Rockit.

racc doesn't support glr therefore making the creation
of the parser much harder. rockit is well. nowhere to be found.
pyggy is very well designed. author responded quick to an email.
and i started a ruby grammar in it without really needing
to actually know *anything* about the process of creating a
grammar so it officially gets my thumbs up ;) (compared to yacc)
anyways. the generated  .rb files could be stored in cvs, or
pyggy/python made a dep. the most important part is that creation
of the grammar is trivial and thusly while getting to pure ruby
will take a while. it can be done incrementally rather than
going with a self developed thing and wasting yourselves several
weeks.

> Though I'll look more closely to see if I'm missing something.

its easy to port :)

> Well the problem was interfacing Parrot with the core lib. The first 
> solution we tried was using Parrot's native call interface to directly 
> acces rubylib, but that didn't work.
>
> The next best solution seemed to be to produce a converter which could 
> translate the c code in to Parrot InterMediate Code. This project 
> didn't really get past the planning stage so I don't know how much 
> work it would be or if it would be a feasible goal.

seems *very* ambitious. possibly too ambitious...

> Like Phil Thomson I haven't had time to focus on Cardinal for a while 
> now.

thats a shame to hear :(
wish ruby had more funding possibilities.

> AFAIK the perl6 implementation is still in the early stages. They have 
> a working parser engine and are working on the perl 6 grammar.
>
> I don't know how far along the the python implementation has gotten.

okay. so all in all slow progress. (parrot)
so. quick question. why parrot? why not ironruby for example?
mono is a hell of a lot more mature than parrot.
.net 2.0 will be getting all the highly used
and needed language impl features that ruby has.

Alex