[ruby-talk:6185] Re: Mapping text to method calls

On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Conrad Schneiker/Austin/Contr/IBM wrote:

> It sort of seems like what you are (implicitly) asking for is (to mention
> one of several possibilities) an IDE development language, a long list of
> (dynamically extensible) behavioral specifications in terms of such a
> language, and something of an expert system to weave everything together
> into a coherent system.

You got that pretty much right, but I wasn't proposing to implement all
of that on the first go - just that this is the sort of stuff I like.

I wrote most of this with reference to C so I'm not sure how much of
this can be done with Ruby. Eg, how could we generate call graphs when
the call being made isn't known until run-time?

> What sort of overall model would others suggest as a general
> framework for dealing with some reasonable subset of the Hal and
> Stephen lists (plus related suggestions)?

  A parser for Ruby source code, extracts classes, methods, and
  reference locations.

  A database for parser results. Accepts incremental updates and can
  handle positional queries from editors.

  A viewer. Could be a couple of listbox widgets for now.

> And how would you generally employ Ruby for implementing that model?

Run Ruby on itself, recursively. Ruby would make a nice IDE development
language and saves having to learn yet another language. :)

-- 
  [e-mail]