From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2003-07-30T23:42:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in Ruby

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 03:25:44PM +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
> > The big advantage is it forces someone to go through and fully
> > specify the syntax, which is quite valuable.
> 
> IMHO this has been done already.

AFAIK the only full specification of the syntax is parse.y (and perhaps
some Japanese book too? I read somewhere that Ruby in a nutshell didn't
have a proper syntax spec)

> > 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.
> 
> Yep, that's an advantage!

Another possibility (currently explored by the Pypy project and based on
Squeak's VM) is translating the code, written in some sort of restricted
Ruby (perhaps Robert Feldt's SRuby) to C, and them compiling. You could
get some serious optimization opportunities if some type inference or
profiling is done before.

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