From: isambart@... (Vincent ISAMBART)
Date: 2004-03-16T17:39:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Embedding Ruby, part 2

Joe Mason <joe@notcharles.ca> wrote in message news:<slrnc5cbq5.a3e.joe@gate.notcharles.ca>...
> In article <20040315092252.09144.00001411@mb-m14.aol.com>, GGarramuno wrote:
> >>1000.times()
> >>{
> >>  a = ls(:type => b)
> >>}
> >>It would be more like standard Ruby and will certainly will be simpler
> >>to do.
> > 
> > Sadly, it's not a good solution, for a bunch of reasons.
> > MEL has over 200 commands just like "ls", all allowing multiple dash options. 
> > These tend to change/be added among Maya versions, too.  The syntax above more
> > or less implies I'll be parsing the options myself, which is insane work and
> > kind of silly as MEL will do its own error checking for those.
> 
> FYI, you can convert symbols (like :type) to strings, so it's simple to use
> the method_missing command described belore to convert the ruby
> parameters ":type => b" to "-type b".  That doesn't fix your other two
> objections, though.

It was the reason why I suggested this solution. But the problem is
that after the first parameter with a value, all others must also be
given a value... And you cannot just copy/paste the MEL code... But
you could easily make in Ruby a MEL to RubyMEL converter (I just hope
the order of the arguments is not important.

> I worry about the consequences of this.  Sounds like a huge security
> hole, but I guess if you trust MEL it's not so bad.  One problem is you
> can't call any MEL functions that are named the same as Ruby methods.
> You'll want to keep your general MEL() function for emergencies, at
> least.  (Just have method_missing convert it's args to a string and then
> call MEL() to do the rest of the work.)
> 
> I like the syntax "MEL.ls -type b", but that might mess up the
> cut-and-pasting you mentioned.

You could use MEL.instance_eval { <put your code here> }, it would
allow you to put many lines of code... But the other problems are
still there... I do not see how you could use something like ls -type
directly in Ruby... I think 'ls -type' will always be seen as
ls(-(type)) with type 'beeing' a variable and '-' the minus
operator...