From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-12-18T01:35:55+09:00
Subject: Re: dsl/library for text interaction?

On Dec 17, 2006, at 12:36 AM, James Moore wrote:

> I've been doing a fair amount of work with Asterisk lately.  It's  
> got a
> command-line interface that looks quite a bit like SMTP (and like  
> lots of
> other text-based send-a-line-and-get-a-response protocols).
>
> Seems like there should be a generic library to build interfaces  
> for these
> sorts of things - is there?  Some sort of DSL that helps you say  
> things
> like:
>
>  - the first thing on the line is the command "FOOBAR"
>  - it takes two required arguments, and one optional
>  - encode the required arguments using (base64/http/whatever)
>  - the response is one line starting with an integer result code
>  - when you get a response matching code X, execute a given block
>  - etc

Perhaps you could use a parser generator?

http://rubyforge.org/projects/dhaka/

James Edward Gray II