[ruby-talk:6304] Re: Source Navigator and Ruby

Dave Thomas writes:

# Just as a proof of concept, I hacked the Ruby parser into an add-in
# for Cygnus/Redhat's Source Navigator 
(http://sources.redhat.com/sourcenav/)
# 
# I've got it handling classes, nested classes, modules, global
# functions and class/module methods. I haven't bothered with the syntax 
# highlighting stuff--that's pretty trivial.
# 
# Anyway, so far the results are encouraging (if you like the Source
# Navigator style of interface). 

Do you happen to like it? Is it something that you would be reasonably 
happy to use for serious development work over the medium-to-long term?

# You can zip back and forth between a
# method and it's definition, view class hierarchies, browse symbols,
# and all sorts of other cool stuff.

Congratulations! 

I noticed the sourcenav download had a *huge* number of files; out of 
curiosity, are you doing more that modifying some 
configuration/specification files that specify auxiliary programs to run 
to return Ruby-specific data?

I also noticed that the URL you gave mentioned that "Source-Navigator 
works with the Insight GUI interface for GDB". Do you happen to know from 
your digging around if the Insight GUI is an optional piece or an integral 
piece of Source-Navigator? 

According to the Insight home page, Insight is a Tcl/Tk application. So I 
was wondering if RTcl, a Tcl-Interpreter in pure Ruby 
(http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=RTcl), might be somehow 
extended and used to transform Insight into a Ruby/Tk application. 

This may be a little far-fetched for such a presumably big application 
that probably has lots of special extensions. But would it be so 
far-fetched for "pure" Tcl/Tk applications? AFAIK, Larry Wall still seems 
to think that his Awk to Perl translator was a Good Thing for Perl, and 
I've been wondering how feasible something like a Tcl/Tk to Ruby 
translator would be. With Ajuba abandoning Tcl development due to its 
recent buyout and with the apparent forthcoming addition of "incr" [i.e. 
OO] stuff to Tcl, the relative syntactical simplicity of Ruby and the 
relative ease of interfacing C to Ruby might make a Ruby/Tk alternative 
more attractive to many people for simple OO/Tk scripting. 

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)