From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2006-03-02T05:48:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Can Anyone Recommend A Good DSL Book?

In article <c4d54c6f0603010706w19b509dbvac479ea9552f77be@mail.gmail.com>,
Sean Mountcastle <smountcastle@gmail.com> wrote:
>I apologize if this has been asked on this list before (I did a quick
>search using Namazu and didn't find any specific books; perhaps that's
>because they don't exist):
>
>Are there any good books on domain specific languages (preferably in
>Ruby)?  I've read Fowler's article on DSLs, I attended Glenn
>Vanderburg's "Metaprogramming Ruby" talk at OSCON, I also listened to
>Rich Kilmer speak at a NoVARUG meeting about a DSL he wrote for the
>USAF/BBN and I've listened to the recording of Domain Specific
>Languages by Jim Weirich from RubyConf 2005 -- but I still don't "get"
>it. It seems like black magic to me, so I'm hoping there's a book out
>there devoted to implementing DSLs using Ruby that can help me better
>understand this useful technique.
>
>Does anyone know of such a book?
>
>Many thanks in advance,
>Sean
>

Not a book, but I'm starting a new blog with a series of articles on how I'm 
re-visioning RHDL - A Ruby-based DSL for describing digital circuits.  HDLs 
(Hardware Description Languages) are likely not familiar to folks here so let 
me give you a bit of background: HDLs such as VHDL and Verilog are used heavily 
now for designing chips.  The semantics of an HDL are mostly quite different 
from the semantics of a regular programming language; think of HDLs as dataflow 
languages  which also describe circuit structure and/or behavior.   Even if 
you're not interested in HDLs, this dataflow aspect might be interesting 
for some as a method for dealing with concurrency.

I'll try to put post up at least every other day or so.  Feel free to post 
comments and questions.  I want this to eventually lead to a series of 
articles and I figure this is a way of writing them and getting immediate 
feedback.  Here's the link:

http://blog.thoughtfiz.net/

Phil