From: Caleb Clausen <vikkous@...>
Date: 2009-05-13T02:00:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Any current preprocessor/Ruby language add-ons?

On 5/12/09, C. Dagnon <c-soc-rubyforum@dagnon.net> wrote:
> This is kind of a wide-ranging question but for some fairly specific
> purposes.
>
> I'm curious what project people are working on with respect to the Ruby
> language, compiler, or any preprocessors.  Specifically I want to use
> file- or project-wide directives (as in VB where new variables require
> explicit declarations), and I want to add preconditions, postconditions,
> type checking, side effects, and tests/behaviour assertions within the
> code files along with associated automated analysis.

You may want to look at RubyMacros, a preprocessor I wrote to add
syntax tree based macros to ruby. I've got a simple assert macro in my
examples; maybe that helps you...

http://www.rubyforge.org/projects/rubymacros
http://github.org/coatl/rubymacros

There have been a number of efforts to add static typing (-ish)
features to ruby. The most recent is Diamondback Ruby; an announcement
for it was posted here a couple weeks ago. It has some kind of method
annotation special comment for declaring types of arguments, like you
wanted.