Hi .. 

 On Thursday 27 January 2005 19:15, Clifford Heath wrote:
> Mark Probert wrote:
> > PCCTS was the predecessor of ANTLR.
>
> Actually, it was the toolset that contained the original ANTLR.
> When they decided they needed a Java version, they didn't go
> multi-lingual - strange decision for a language research group!
>
:-) I guess that it could have been worse.  I notice that someone is working 
on a Python generator for ANTLR.  I wonder how hard it would be to do a Ruby 
version?

> Another suite of language tools we used successfully a few years
> back was Eli. 
>
That looks interesting, though it does seem a little tooly.  

> >>>... *Ruby syntax extensions*
> >
> > Forth?  ;-)  it's a case of back to the future ..
>
> No, I mean syntax extensions - not choosing a language with an
> almost complete absence of syntax :-). So you could define useful
> and appropriate domain-specific-languages...
>
:-)

One of the parts of Forth that I really like is the ability to extend the 
language in arbitrary ways.  So, if you want to add syntax into the language, 
then you are free to do so, and it is still Forth.  So, there are guys out 
there that have added OOP and Functional extensions to Forth, there is a 
parser-generator (Anton Ertl's 'Gray'), a version of Lisp, in-fix extensions, 
and so on.  

You could argue that every Forth program is an extension into a 
domain-specific language.  But I wouldn't be so bold as to do that in this 
forum ;-)

As a bit of fun, I once embedded a Forth system (ATLAST) into Ruby.  It is 
kind of fun to extend Ruby that way, though a little heretical.  

>
> ... Unfortunately the individuals who are
> capable of implementing these processes are so adept at linguistics
> that they can't explain the processes in terms that we mortals can
> understand :-)... though I'm sure I almost understood it once... :-)
>
:-) Now that is something that I can understand and completely agree with.

Regards,

-- 
-mark.  (probertm at acm dot org)