Hallo Pit,

> Thank you for the example. Lets see if I understand what you're doing: 
> you have a given Ruby code (the learning extractor) and need to 
> manipulate it according to certain rules to create a modified version of 
> the code (the generalized extractor).

Exactly!

> Well, in your example it looks like you use nothing but the Scrubyt DSL. 
> In this case you could capture the calling sequence and the method 
> arguments when you execute the DSL. But if you want to allow normal Ruby 
> code in the #define block (loops, conditionals, etc), then I can't think 
> of other solutions.

Yes, we are just adding this possibility (so you can do branching etc. 
with native Ruby code - a DSL is fine but it always has its limits, 
whereas Ruby doesn't :-) - so in the long run we have to do this (or 
something equally powerful).

> If I really wanted to support Windows users,
Yeah, we surely do! A lot of them are using scRUBYt!, too...

> I'd try to compile 
> ParseTree with MinGW and/or convince the maintainers to provide a binary 
> version of the gem :-)
Well, I don't really understand why aren't they doing this anyway, since
their windows users have the same trouble as we do (actually we have it 
just because of ParseTree). This is a viable alternative if others do 
not work out (mainly the next paragraph).

ATM one team member is working on a solution called ParseTreeReloaded 
which will wrap pure Ruby code around ParseTree so no C compiling will 
be needed. ATM ParseTreeReloaded can already parse its own source code 
so I guess he's making some great progress... Let's see.

> But my question wasn't meant as a recommendation not to use ParseTree. 
> I'm simply interested in use cases for working with the Ruby AST.
Yeah sure, I am also in the don't-drop-parsetree camp... however if we 
can not solve this problem permanently under windows (which I am 99% 
positive we can) I'll have to look for a different solutions because of 
the win32 ppl...

Cheers,
Peter
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