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What Ruby Needs

  • Posted By Stuart Halloway on September 20, 2006

Ola Bini: “maybe if there was a well defined way that Ruby translates into something that resembles S-expressions…” Right on! And not just so we can have hygienic macros. The closer code is to data, the easier it is to write automated tests, aspects, and all manner of other “meta” levels of reuse.

Ruby is not a good enough Lisp, and Lisp isn’t either. :-) But we’re getting closer.

Comments
  1. Jeremy VoorhisSeptember 21, 2006 @ 08:26 AM
    We do have that now, in a roundabout way. Ryan Davis' parsetree and ruby2ruby libraries can convert Ruby classes to and from s-expressions represented with Arrays, Strings and Symbols. Using Ryan's s-expression parser, you can remix your sexp and serialize them w/ ruby2ruby. http://blog.zenspider.com/archives/2005/02/rubytoruby.html