On 8 Mar 2007, at 17:29, Kent Palmer wrote: > I would like to see some marriage between Ruby and Unicon. > > The idea of making Unicon a DSL on top of Ruby would be very > appealing to me. But I don't know what that would do for performance. > > Both Icon and Ruby have C interfaces. Perhaps there is some way to > marry them via their interfaces. Is that possible?
Well I must admit to being a bit of a Rubyista these days, mainly thanks to the elegant syntax and the ease of meta-programming. It's not a better language than Un/icon, and where string handling is concerned I find Regular Expressions the most infuriating alternative to a decent scanning environment, but as mainstream languages go it's by far the most enjoyable to work with. It's also a dream for network coding or anything where native bindings are useful. To my way of thinking it's Lisp for those of us who like syntax ;) A couple of times I've considered the possibility of an Iconish DSL for Ruby or a Ruby translator for the Unicon runtime, but these are both substantial projects. There are implementations of generators and scanning environments for Ruby but they don't fit as well as they do in Icon, but more frustrating is the lack of goal direction. That's what hooked me on Icon back in the v5 days, and the addition of this has been discussed several times in the Ruby community but it's a hard feature to sell to people who've never used it. It's disappointing that the two great language loves of my life are basically incompatible at this point in time :( Ellie Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains ---- raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Unicon-group mailing list Unicon-group@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unicon-group
