On 16 May 2012 00:17, Ryan Davis <ryand-= ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:

On May 13, 2012, at 16:53 , Jeremy W. wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I've been playing around with Ripper for the first time today. =A0= Parsing
> method calls with and without parentheses gives me different output an= d
> I'm not sure why. When using brackets, Ripper outputs a 'metho= d',
> without them gives me a 'command'.
>
> Are these actually different things inside Ruby, or is this just a
> difference in the way Ripper outputs them?
>
> If there is a internal difference between them, could someone please > point me to either some more information, or the relevant bit of the > Ruby source code I need to read to learn more.
>
> If they are not different internally, what is the reason that Ripper > displays them as such?

Because ripper shows too much detail about the way the parse tree is = engineered and not about the semantics of the language itself. This is (I s= uspect) because ripper was done "on the cheap" by reusing the par= se.y file and injecting different terminal actions using #ifdef's.

=A0

Right, that was all exceedingly helpful= - thank you.

My issue with ruby_parser was that i= t didn't seem to support things like Ruby 1.9 hashes. Would I be right = in presuming that the new release will support 1.9 and that=A0in the interi= m I can=A0just get the source from Github and use that?

If so then I'll use ruby_parser instead of ripper a= nd move forward from there. Its output seems to be cleaner and clearer, and= I can work through the repos on Github, especially ruby2ruby, to get a goo= d grasp of the sexp that it is outputting.

Thanks again for your help. If I do have any more quest= ions regarding your projects, is there a preferred method for me to ask (th= is list, email, etc)?

Jeremy