From: John Carter Date: 2000-12-07T18:06:23+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:6882] Ruby in Ruby One of the Cutest things I have ever seen is the lisp interpreter in lisp. I keep the original McCarthy book as a treasured item on my bookshelf. I keep banging my head against the fact that self reflective languages have a large number of very nice uses... * Refactoring transforms and operations need to understand the language. * Program instrumenting programs are very powerful development tools. * The whole field of program analysis is almost left a begging 'cause C/C++ is such a mess to analyse. We have a grammar for Ruby. parse.y How much semantic level fiddling is going on in there? eg. In C++ it doesn't help just to have a grammar, there is lots of ambiguity that only gets resolved at a semantic level by context. eg. Type declarators. How difficult would it be to write the Ruby interpreter in Ruby? I see in the RAA a rbison, and a Rubyjit, and even (maybe?) a byaccr. Could one translate Ruby text into a structure of Ruby objects? What is Ruby inside? A Compile to byte-code and then a byte code interpreter? Is there a how the Ruby Interpreter works doc in english? John Carter Work Email : john@netsys.co.za Private email : cyent@mweb.co.za Yell Phone : 083-543-6915 Phone : 27-12-348-4246 Carter's Compass... I know I'm on the right track when by deleting code I'm adding functionality.