From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2012-01-15T11:09:31+09:00
Subject: Help or Advice appreciated for parsing

Hi,

I am working on some pseudo-www language.

The idea is simple - every HTML tag becomes a method call.

  <h4>

Would become:

  h4

And

  <h4>Test</h4>

Would become:

  h4 'Test'

This works ok-ish, but I am feeling that it is reaching an end here
slowly.

For instance, I actually no longer want to use pure Ruby to interpret
all that.

I would like to be able to do something like:

  h4 Test

Optionally, Without any "" or '' Quotes at all.

In other words, I think in the long run I wish to create a real little
"language" and interpret this language instead (and map calls to
functions on my own).

Ok, this hopefully sets a little context of what I am trying to do.

Now I was looking at old code of mine and I noticed something like this:

  e '<area shape=rect coords="1,1,100,50" href="http://www.foobar.com">
'

This is just a ruby string basically, nothing fancy at all. (7 years old
code or something, I was not even using method calls here).

Now I was thinking "Hmm, I could turn this into a method call, like:

  area :rect, '1,1,100,50','www.foobar.com'

And this reads a little bit better. It is a bit shorter. Problem is ...
it required a fixed argument listing. And it requires one to use ','
too, which I don't really like either.

Then I was thinking "Hmm, why wouldn't I not treat those method calls as
real objects instead? And the params would become messages.

So I then thought "Let's try this:"

  area.shape 'rext' .coords '1,1,100,50' .href 'http://www.foobar.com'

Ok, this does not work in Ruby. Even adding () won't work, the method
chaining happens on String object eventually (and I would have cheated,
area would be def area, so area() instead, returning a specific class
that would respond to methods like shape, coords, href.

I am not really sure if I am able to express what I am trying to
achieve. :)

I would like to create a language for the WWW, that is terse, elegant
and avoids repetition. HTML is way too verbose and I would never go back
to write it on my own again anyway.

I am also not sure how this language should look like, either.

  area shape: rec coords: 1,1,100,50 href: http://www.foobar.com

I think I am favouring this right now. But this would not be valid Ruby,
so my question would be, basically ... how would I turn this into valid
ruby? (It will always be on the same line. New line means something else
happens, some other tag.)

Confused right now...

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