From: Clifford Heath <no@...>
Date: 2011-05-17T08:20:30+09:00
Subject: Re: canonical/syntax-diagrams representation.

On 05/16/11 20:37, no.top.post@gmail.com wrote:
> I started investigating ruby.
> It's very informal, which is NOT suitable for computing.

This line is the reason you have alienated other respondents.
That's a pity, because the rest of your message is reasonable.
On behalf of the Ruby community, I'd like to say that their
response was... embarrassing at best. When did this community
become so... insular, defensive, and basically just unpleasant?
It certainly wasn't like that in 2002 when I joined it.
C'mon folks, we're better than this...

> The bloke who heads 'intentional programming'

Charles Simonyi, <http://www.intentsoft.com/>. He was the
prime mover behind the creation of icrosoft Word and Excel,
so (however little you may like those) he's no lightweight.
Intentional have been in a dark pre-startup phase doing some
pretty interesting things for some years now (even if Charles'
first patent in the area was a decade after my almost identical
invention, presented to HP in 1987). Prior art, any one? I have
records...

> Because this is my Nth programming language, I just
> want to make a<template driven editor>  for my `mc`;
> where the basic structures can be merely filled in.

Good idea, but *very* hard with Ruby's syntax.

> IMO the clearest syntax representation ever, was the
> syntax-diagram format of PASCAL which was used in
> the 70s.

You can get railroad diagrams from ANTLRworks for any ANTLR
grammar. However they (and syntax-directed editors in general)
are much less effective for languages that require significant
look-ahead.If you manage to make an ANTLR grammar for Ruby,
I'll be a little amazed (though it's definitely possible)
and you'll be a hero in here. But it's a massive task.
The LALR-based grammar for Ruby has many context-sensitive
areas which rely on large look-ahead.

> Can anybody point me to an on-line minimal formal
> syntax for ruby, so as to not rely on the chatty tutors.
> We want a train-time-table format; not a novel.

No such syntax description exists. Even if it did, a syntax
directed editor probably wouldn't work very well for Ruby.

Clifford Heath.