From: cnmaclean@...
Date: 2005-02-16T03:14:53+09:00
Subject: Ruby as a domain specific language?

Hi

In my company, we're looking at creating a domain-specific language.
Instead of being a totally proprietary language, which we'd have to
support and which would probably be limited in various ways etc., I was
thinking about the possibility of basing it on an existing language,
and Ruby in particular seemed to come to my attention.
I haven't really used Ruby at all, but from what I've read, it seems
like it could be quite suitable.

What I'm wondering is, are there any good resources on using Ruby as a
domain-specific language?  Is there any documentation on the different
way in which Ruby can be extended to support domain-specific
constructs?

What we're trying to do in particular is define a data description
langauge, where we can define human-readable "translations" for hex
data.  This would be largely in a declarative style (e.g. "DataItem
Name='My Data' Coding='Language' Length=2"); using something like Ruby
might allow us to do the simple things (like the above) simply, but
still keep open the possibility of using the power of a programming
language where required - e.g. where the data structure is particularly
dynamic.
The other characteristic of our language is that it will probably be
fairly hierarchically structured.  For example, we have the concept of
translations for files, which may be contained in folders.  So we'd
want to specify parent folders (with identifiers), and other
files/folders as children of these folders; the "leaf" files would have
translations etc. associated with them.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Calum