DeRailed DSL (was Re: compile-time regex redux)

[Robby]

ugh, snip

At the end of the day it seems as if there has been miscommunication 
throughout, I mean.. RoR's expressiveness has nothing to do with RoR 
directly, it's Ruby. By design D is never going to be as expressive as 
Ruby. Of course that's an objective comment, but how minimal, and how 
readable Ruby can be written in is a compliment to it's very own 
language. However, if you're ever curious, may look at the parser for 
Ruby's language, wow (and people working on D's for various reasons have 
a lot less headaches without it)

Ruby is by design something that can *produce* a dsl easily. There's 
even talk of some in the Java camp on dropping ANT for a full language 
(jruby : rake).

  In some posts it seems like the conversation is consuming them, and in 
some posts it's about building them, this thread is seemingly hard to 
follow.

A problem domain that would be YAML, it needs specifics internally, it 
needs the ability to consume and generate, and it's starting to get 
decent support. To me, that would be a decent example, even if it was 
done through community involvement.