From: John Carter Date: 2000-12-13T15:26:39+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:7134] Re: Ruby in Ruby On Wed, 13 Dec 2000, Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting wrote: >"Ben Tilly" writes: >.. on the idea of multiple front-ends to the Ruby internals > > Ruby in Ruby sounds cool, but for me the value of Ruby is that it is "an > OO scripting language". I'm willing to trade a lot of speed to keep the > advantage of portable, dynamic scripting, after all it's not as if there > aren't enough compiled languages out there:-) Ah, but the number of highly usable pure OOP flexible fully reflective compiled languages out there are umm, err, umm, ahh, zero? Ok, there is RScheme. There are many things about RScheme that I love, but it lacks the umm, er, dare I say, diagonal properties of Perl / Ruby. The point of ruby in ruby is less compilation, but more reflection. http://www.tunes.org/Review/Reflection.html has a lot to say on the subject. Ben Tilly's point about multiple front ends is correct. Once you remove the idea that text is the language and replace it with an "Object Tree" is the language, the gates are open to a large number of strange thoughts. What about graphical representations of a program? Reverse engineering the UML diagrams becomes much easier. Why not program in Asian pictographs instead of western ASCII? Why can't the partially sighted / blind replace their representation of programs by something more suited to them. eg. Be able to trace the flow of control by tactile diagrams. Perhaps have overlayable tactile data flow and flow of control representations of a program. The thing here is ruby is 90% of the way to Tune's ideal. It has the node structure, one step more makes it reflective. It is pure OOPS already. 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.