[ruby-talk:15405] Re: Ruby in Java

On Sat, 19 May 2001, ts wrote:
> >>>>> "M" == Mathieu Bouchard <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
> M> 	A. Keep the "Ruby Parser in Ruby" as a reference implementation
> 
>  Well, it exist a reference implementation for ruby, see parse.y
> 
>  :-((((((
> 
> Guy Decoux

While I have lex and yacc on my resume it is mostly in the hopes that
people will be impressed and not ask me to actually *implement*
something with them... ;-) 

Seriously, I have looked at parse.y until I am blue in the face and no
good has come out of it. I considered SWIGing parse.tab.c but it turned
out to be a painful process and I stopped. 

Perhaps there is a way to do a Java implementation in a slightly easier
way. For example,  a two-stage process: let CRuby do it's work parsing
the source file and then access it's parse tree to create Java code.
Hm... come to think of it, I haven't dug deep enough to figure out just
how Ruby does implement it's parse tree (something that I will
definitely have to know before going much further with this project!). 

Another method is to take the Ruby source tree and translate line by
line  to Java... this is the method used by Jython. I believe that the
Python syntax is much simpler to parse, however... somebody correct me
if I am wrong... but nonetheless it is a moot point since Python user
programs have access to the internal parser and AST trees from the
parser.py module... 

Hm...