compile-time regex redux

Robby robby.lansaw at gmail.com
Thu Feb 8 00:07:55 PST 2007


>>
>> Walter gave another good case study: Ruby on Rails. The success of 
>> Ruby on Rails has a lot to do with its ability to express abstractions 
>> that were a complete mess to deal with in concreteland.
>>
> 
> Let look at that case study, then. The /real/ power in RoR comes from 
> being able to dynamically bind via rich reflection. What we're talking 
> about here does not add full reflection to D. Neither does it assist in 
> getting D modules dynamically loaded at runtime.
> 
> As it turns out, some of us are actively looking /specifically/ at the 
> killer RoR for D; far beyond what RoR does. Oddly enough, our working 
> name for it is - DeRailed -
> 
> We have solid notions of what's needed; and several of us have build 
> related platforms in the past. But this topic, at face value, doesn't 
> appear to help us in any notable fashion. Perhaps you can expain this 
> further?
> 
> - Kris

I'm having a hard time putting together the association with RoR, DSL's 
and the regex feature together. Perhaps they're completely separate.

RoR really doesn't express abstractions per se, Ruby does and very well 
actually. Actually the real power comment pertains to Ruby, instead of 
RoR - but I agree on it's intended meaning.

I've hacked around on a possible ActiveRecord 'wannabe'[1] from time to 
time over the past few weeks and must admit I constantly miss things 
that are just there in Ruby
-some of the things I'm aware are going to be hard to transcribe to D 
due to it's background - blocks
-some things that just haven't been implemented yet - true dynamic 
information/loading,
-somethings that just don't represent themselves well in D - symbols, 
*everything* is an object.

But the languages as they are are pretty close to each other (pretty 
painless interfacing to c code, mixins etc.

Not you directly Kris, however I've seen mentioned a few times about 
needing an RoR of D (an en mass application to bring in new developers.)
There are significant downsides to this situation should it happen[2] 
and there are issues with having such an application.

I personally came to D for a few reasons, which is probably too long to 
bring here, however one of the things I liked about using Ruby almost 
exclusively was the pure readability that came with the language by 
design[3]. I find D quite readable at present, I just hope it doesn't 
lose that edge for meta programming concepts.[4]

If I could ask for one feature.. it would be bringing the method with an 
array argument over to all built in types. While the built in type 
wouldn't be object based such as ruby's, the approach would be quite nice.

I must admit, with over 200 feeds I read throughout the day I find 
myself reading more and more in this set of NG's, I'm enjoying the 
insight, and D and its community should be proud of the community it's 
fostered.. it's quite nice.

And personally, IMO a compiled, c style Rebol'ish setup would be the 
'one killer app', the amount of wow that little 'engine that could' does
is awesome..

Robby


[1] any central point of contact for DeRailed? I'd be willing to sling 
code, thoughts if there is one.
[2] 
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/ruby_is_not_a_religion.html 
shows the downsides to the whole utopia application issue
[3]Allowing '?' as a final character to an indentifier and the 
convention for representing boolean methods is a simple and pure example 
among others.
[4]Yeah, I've read "Beating the Averages" by Graham and I understand 
that the readability will come with learning.. but I'm coming from a new 
user point of view...

Context: I've written in Ruby for over 4 years, and have used Rails 
since inception so I'm not used to the compile time frame of mind (thus 
I'm pretty useless to a thread such as this :))



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