From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2003-07-30T14:05:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in Ruby

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:15:18 +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
>>  On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>>>  Over on the pragprog list, Ron Jeffries suggested that it might be
>>>  interesting to implement Ruby in Ruby. I thought -- but could not find
>>>  quickly -- that someone had started such a project. I realise right now
>>>  that this might be much slower, but it would seem to me to make it
>>>  easier to make something like Rite or some other bytecode system
>>>  possible, wouldn't it?
>  Maybe I'm beeing stupid but I can't see the advantage in doing this other
>  than intellectual challenge and interest.  Is there any other?

The big advantage is it forces someone to go through and fully 
specify the syntax, which is quite valuable. It also would give you a 
pluggable library you could use in, say, a syntax-highlighting IDE or 
refactoring browser, since you can't properly highlight syntax or 
refactor if you can't parse the code.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk