From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2001-11-29T23:10:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26896] Re: Article on Program design; dynamism

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Henning von Rosen wrote:

> Where would you like more dynamism i Ruby ("still to little dynamism IMHO"),
> do you mean built in AOP?
>
Yes and here's some more from the top of the head (and note that I haven't
thought about if it would be wise to really add all this to Ruby, there
are countless things to think about then that I'm not competent to think
about; this is just things that I bumped into that made me feel "its in
the way". Also note I'm not complaining; Ruby and Matz are
great! Another disclaimer is that I'm a dynlang newbie so...):
 
* "call_stack" and/or Mathjus even better RCR
* access to more components of the VM such as parser etc. 
* Access to internal program format and an API to "edit" and question it 
 (an API might alleviate the problem that giving access to internal
  structures could make things break when they are changed)
  Would enable macros and what have you (even optimizations!).
* Updating the parser dynamically to allow adding new infix
  operators.
* Pluggable internals so that I could for example write a new GC in Ruby,
  plug it in and compare.
* At the extreme end: No decisions should be fixed, everything
  changeable/pluggable... ;-)

Note that much of this stuff can be considered "experiments" so probably
shouldn't be in std Ruby. Would be fun though... ;-)

Regards,

Robert