Re: [Cardinal-dev] Ping?!

[Einar Karttunen]

On 13.11 22:20, Phil Tomson wrote:
> At this point I'm thinking that Ruth probably offers the best near-term
> solution.  Since it essentially uses Matz's parse.y it's compliant.
> We can get an AST out of it.  From the AST we can produce PIR which can be
> fed into imcc (at least that's how I understand that it should be done).

Getting unoptimised PIR out of AST should be quite easy. Of course
if we create a quick hack we have to rewrite it later. However 
getting something to work would lure more developers in.

> Yes, it would ultimately be nice to have a Ruby parser written in Ruby and
> that should be the longterm goal.  If we can agree on how the AST should
> look (and I think Ruth actually uses RubySchema which was an AST
> definition developed by the Ruby-in-Ruby project) then it should be
> possible to eventually get rid of Ruth and replace it with a Ruby parser
> written in Ruby.

Using yacc is a kludge imho, but it might be worth it for short term
benefits. 

> Here's a question for Dan: What about eval?  Say we're running on parrot
> and someone wants to eval a string of Ruby code?  What happens?  I assume
> it has to call whatever Ruby parser we have.

Yes, this means that the runtime library will have to contain a Ruby parser.
Of course if Ruby is pure parrot bytecode it can be distributed easier:
the same as with java versus activex. This will only affect things if
Ruby is an optional part to parrot i.e. not available by default.

- Einar Karttunen