From: Sean Mountcastle <smountcastle@...>
Date: 2006-03-02T05:30:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Anyone Recommend A Good DSL Book?

Gary and Tom,

Thanks for the pointers, I've read the AW AWK Programming Language and
O'Reilly lex & yacc books.  From the presentations I've seen on Ruby
DSLs, it doesn't seem like folks are writing parsers -- it seems more
like Lisp macros where the program is being written as its being
interpreted.

In the same way that Ruby's attr_accessor creates getter/setter
methods for the specified symbols (instance variables), DSL 'gurus'
have created similar constructs which implement the 'mini language'
without the drugery of writing a parser/compiler.

It looks like there are no "How to write DSLs in Ruby" books currently
available or planned.

Regards,
Sean

On 3/1/06, Tom Copeland <tom@infoether.com> wrote:
> >
> > You might want to read chapter 6 of The AWK Programming
> > Language (Aho, Kernighan, Weinberger).  The title of that
> > chapter is 'little
> > languages'.
> > The chapter includes the following examples (in AWK of course):
> >
> >       assembler and interpreter
> >       drawing graphs
> >       a sort generator
> >       a reverse-polish calculator
> >       an infix calculator
> >       recursive-descent parsing
>
> Along the same lines, the O'Reilly Lex and Yacc book (by John Levine and
> several others) has some little DSL examples - a menu generation system
> and whatnot.
>
> Yours,
>
> Tom
>
>
>