From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-02-16T18:34:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as a domain specific language?

In article <1108491215.889243.288190@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
 <cnmaclean@hotmail.com> wrote:
>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
>


I would tend to say it more like: Ruby for creating a domain specific 
language (DSL).

Ruby excells in creating DSLs primarily because of it's code blocks.  I've 
created a couple of DSLs with Ruby:

QDL (Quantum Description Language) - a language for describing quantum 
logic circuits.  See: 
http://nexp.cs.pdx.edu/~qc/cgi-bin/view/QC/QuantumDesignLanguage

RHDL (Ruby Hardware Description Langauge) - a language for describing 
hardware (and simulating concurrency).  See:
http://www.aracnet.com/~ptkwt/ruby_stuff/RHDL/


Code blocks allow you to create a very natural-looking DSL directly 
in Ruby without need of a special parser.


There's also Rake which could definately fall into the catagory of a DSL.

Phil