From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-10-24T02:41:07+09:00
Subject: Re: NODE tree introspection

In article <86fzuxuppd.fsf@squash.oucs.ox.ac.uk>,
Simon Cozens  <simon@ermine.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>I've been considering writing something for Ruby similar to the Perl
>B.pm module; this is a module which provides Perl-level access to the
>bytecode op tree, so that other modules can walk the op tree in
>various interesting ways. This is the way the Perl to C compiler was
>implemented. (however unsuccessfully...)
>
>It seems reasonably easy to do in Ruby, just by wrapping the NODE*
>structures as Ruby objects. Has anyone already done this or tried
>working on it?
>

Hmmmm.... interesting idea.  So basically what you're proposing would be 
able to walk the AST of the currently running program (or any arbitrary 
snippet that you send off to eval?)?   I actually have some use for this 
kind of thing so if you do it please keep us informed.

I don't think anyone has approached the problem in the way you propose.  
Can you give some more details of how you're thinking of doing it?  I know 
that Bob Calco is working on a Ruby parser based on Matz' Ruby yacc file 
and he intends it to be a Ruby extension (on second thought, maybe what 
he is doing is similar to what you're thinking of doing).

Phil