Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article written by our professor Ariel Ortiz. The article/paper is titled “Language Design and Implementation using Ruby and the Interpreter Pattern “. After reading this paper, I realized some things. First of all, I got really impressed that this paper explains a framework used to teach in a course, in my actual university, that I already took. Second, in the title the Interpreter Pattern is mentioned and actually in another course (from which I also write a blog weekly) we are treating design patterns. It’s important to mention that I’m taking that course now and it is with the same professor.
 Basically, The S-expression Interpreter Framework (SIF) is explained in this article as a tool for teaching language design and implementation concepts. This interpreter was written in Ruby to help us, the students, to learn a popular object-oriented dynamic language and language design and implementations concepts. But here is the curious point, I don’t remember seeing this interpreter in that course, instead of that we wrote a metacircular evaluator in Clojure. I suppose because Clojure started to grow in the past years, but I would have liked to take a look into this interpreter while I was taking that course. Why? First because it includes the interpreter pattern, and I think it can help me in my other course (Software Design and Architecture in which we are also using Ruby) and also because our professor stays in his paper that SIF can be easily extended, so I started thinking: will I be able to perform that activity?
In general, I got surprised of how this course has been taught for more than 15 years at my university, and also how a course can change through the years depending on the field modifications and the moment tendencies when it is imparted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about this course book called “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” published in 1979 by Douglass Adams. This book is literally a journey through space. The main character Arthur Dent escaped from the Earth with Ford Prefect (the actual writer for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) because it was going to be destroyed. Arthur and Ford escaped on a Vogon ship (the ones who destroyed the Earth), but they were blasted into space and caught by another ship piloted by Zaphod Beeblebox, the king of the universe. That ship was both stolen and special because it has the “improbability drive” that literally functions as it sounds, with improbability. Thanks to that ship ability they arrived at a legend planet called Magrathea, where they found all the truth. That planet was the home of a computer built to find the answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Guess what? The answer is 42 and the Earth was another super-computer built t...
Read more

Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

Hi, today’s blog entry is going to talk about an article called “Building Server-Side Web Language Processors and once again, the author is our Compilers Design professor Ariel Ortiz. Basically, it talks about and discusses useful insights for instructors who are considering using some kind of web approach in the courses involving language design and implementation. The purpose is to have students build a language processor that runs on the web, rather than on processor that runs on a command-line shell as normally they do. This web tool or web server was used for three different courses: Programming Languages, Language Translators and Software Development Project. I want to mention that from these subjects, I also have taken the first one, while the others are completely new to me, I’ve never heard about them and I think they aren’t imparted anymore, at least not with that name. I found interesting that incorporation of a web-based approach into those courses. Why? Because it inv...
Read more